A Solo Exhibition by Changpeng Li

Free Fall
2 October – 31 December 2025
Curated by Junyao Chen
LOY Gallery Singapore is honoured to present "Free Fall," the inaugural Singapore solo exhibition by Chinese artist Changpeng Li, curated by Junyao Chen. On view from October 2 to December 31, 2025, the exhibition features a series of recent monochromatic works dominated by a distinctive lilac palette. Through montage-like visual syntax and unique colour strategy, the works explore the "free fall" and development of images within memory and perception.
Li's practice offers a profound response to our screen-age visual experience. Like a darkroom technician, he captures and suspends fleeting imagery from social media, news events and private memories at that hovering moment "just about to happen." These narrative ellipses - empty street corners, an unclicked shutter, cropped gestures - invite viewers to complete meanings through personal memory, transforming painting into a medium of deep resonance.
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The artist's persistent lilac hue transcends formal qualities, carrying profound symbolic significance. This hazy, nearly pathological tone neutralizes the provocative nature and disparities of original images, merging news brutality, media glamour and daily banality into a silent, twilight unity. It serves as both metaphor for collective alienation and a chromatic politics that reshapes social perception. The works' dimensions intentionally approximate electronic screens, simultaneously mimicking and resisting contemporary viewing habits. Without clear protagonists or narratives, viewers are drawn into closer engagement where meaning emerges in the moment of encounter—an echo "summoned from absence."
"Free Fall" ultimately reorchestrates the very act of viewing. Within Li's suspended temporality, seeing becomes development, and images become triggers for contemplation, inviting audiences to reclaim meaningful engagement beyond the rapid flow of visual information.
Sprinter, 2024: Sprinter focuses on the blurred dashboard of a moving car, freezing a moment of transit that suggests both passage and pause. Like the quiet, empty frames in cinema, the work amplifies what remains unsaid. Shadows, reflections, and uncertain vantage points build a sense of anticipation, directing attention to the unseen forces that shape perception and memory beyond the frame.
Tail, 2024: Tail is drawn from a striking frame in an advertisement, where sunlight falls through an iron window and casts a shadow across the wall. A curled form emerges—part detail of the structure, part trace of projection—read as a tail without positing a figure. Within its muted violet register, the painting holds this tension between presence and absence, using shadow and perspective to evoke quiet suspense and invite reflection on what lies beyond the visible.
The exhibition was assisted by Yuandi Xu and Qingyao Li in text research.