Mingzhang Sun: Once, Lotus

We are pleased to present Once, Lotus, a collection of paintings by Mingzhang Sun, that trace a decade of artistic evolution shaped by introspection and cultural memory.

This exhibition moves across time and place, exploring Ming’s evolution from a childhood in central China to establishing a new life amongst the facades of London. Tracing a life lived in fragments and reassembled through paint. Each work unfolds a visual autobiography, in which the lotus becomes not only a motif, but a mirror; a symbol of what survives beneath the surface, and what resists forgetting. 

Throughout Chinese cultural and spiritual traditions, the lotus has held deep and profound meaning, embodying long standing symbolic significances. Emblematic of purity rising from the mud, the lotus reflects the soul’s capacity to bloom in adversity - to renew without bitterness. Either in metaphor or motif, the lotus can be seen throughout Ming’s work. Just as the lotus blooms unsullied from the mud, each painting confronts dualities; fragility and strength, loss and radiance, memory and reflection. A resilient cipher of the human condition. 

Ming’s engagement with the lotus is both inherited and insurgent, recalling memories throughout a rebellious artistic language. His lived experience - of personal trauma, familial rejection, cultural displacement, and systemic pressure - is folded into every composition. Elongated and distorted forms, surreal landscapes, and textured surfaces evoke the fragility of the body and the tenacity of emotion. Figures appear suspended between worlds: part dream, part confession, marked by an underlying solitude. 

Alongside a evolution in composition, Ming’s material use has grown more expansive, mirroring the developments in his practice. Early works, often in oil on canvasboard, are compact and intimate. As the years progress, his surfaces begin to breathe: raw fabric and thread appear alongside oil paint, converging to blur emotional boundaries. These choices are not just aesthetic flourishes but deliberate acts of reconstitution - ways of binding past and present. 

The lotus thus becomes a way of growth, of remembering, and of gently defying erasure. A witness of the artist’s journey and a gesture toward healing. In Once, Lotus, Mingzhang Sun offers us paintings that do not shout but give quiet testament to what it means to experience life fully, to endure, and to begin again.