Beijing’s Gallery Weekend has just opened and is unfolding in tandem with the rising heat. One room, though, felt distinctly cool: the second-floor gallery at Galleria Continua, where works in black, white, and gray brought the temperature down at once for those of us coming in from the blazing sun. This is the Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck’s latest solo exhibition, "Vanishing," featuring thirteen large new watercolor works from 2023, along with thirty-four works in other mediums, including sculpture, installation, and video.
Hans Op de Beeck solo exhibition "Vanishing," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2023. His sculptures include vividly lifelike figures, but also highly symbolic motifs such as peacocks and lilies, as well as full-scale scenes of a carousel, an abandoned park, and a public library. His work has a way of drawing viewers wholly into its scenes, like an open novel telling countless stories, each of them available to personal interpretation.
His work has appeared at major exhibitions including the Lyon Biennale, the Venice Biennale, the Setouchi Triennale, and Art Basel in Switzerland, and has also been shown at art institutions in France, Italy, China, Finland, Sweden, and elsewhere. On the eve of the exhibition, we spoke with the artist in the gallery about the startling theatricality of his work and his distinctive gray-black palette. Hans Op de Beeck interviewed by Yitiao Art. Hans Op de Beeck and Mario Cristiani, one of the founders of Galleria Continua, mimicking the pose of a sculpture. Seeing Hans Op de Beeck in person at the exhibition, our first thought was: he fits the room uncannily well.
He wore a light-gray suit and trousers, and a charcoal-gray T-shirt. The only color was the pair of green sneakers on his feet.
“I took the color out of these sculptures, as if they had petrified, frozen in time.” Hans Op de Beeck solo exhibition "Vanishing," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2023. Hans Op de Beeck, "Tatiana (butterfly)," 2017. The exhibition is divided into three sections, all in shades of gray. Entering the gallery, we first encountered a rectangular black room with four sculptures: a still life on a table, a smoking woman, a girl playing with a butterfly, and a birthday cake. They seemed unrelated, yet the atmosphere they created together was remarkably harmonious.
Hans Op de Beeck, "Vanitas Table," 2023. "Vanitas Table" is a Baroque-style table heaped with objects. On it are candlesticks, a skull, and an inkwell that seem to come from antiquity, but also a distinctly contemporary vase, as if things from different cultural worlds and historical eras had somehow arrived on the same tabletop.
“It’s like the early Renaissance, when people wanted to show off the places they had traveled, so they collected objects from around the world and put them together in cabinets,” Op de Beeck said. Hans Op de Beeck, "Happy Birthday," 2020. The most striking work in the room, though, is the enormous half-eaten birthday cake. The candles burned halfway down, the cream sliding off the surface, the unfinished morsel left on a fork: it calls to mind the battlefield every birthday party becomes after it ends.
Op de Beeck’s explanation only confirmed the association.
“Whenever there’s a birthday party at home, by 3 A.M. everyone is too exhausted. You obviously can’t clean up. You just want to go to your room and collapse. Then the next morning, you open the door and the living room looks as if it’s been bombed, with empty glasses everywhere, and these may be the cleanest things you can find. Imagine the trash cans overflowing, and all the food left behind. My God, there’s nothing sadder than opening the living-room door the morning after a party.”
As he said this, the artist let out a sigh, and we all burst into laughter. Hans Op de Beeck, "Vanishing Point," 2023. Beside the sculpture gallery was an all-black box screening "Vanishing Point," a twenty-two-minute video work the artist had only just completed before flying to Beijing. The film opens with a little boy sleeping serenely on the water; the model was the artist’s younger son, Toon.
It is an animated film made from large black-and-white watercolors: clowns, still lifes, landscapes, peacocks. The film and the series of black-and-white watercolors in the main first-floor gallery, one moving and one still, create a kind of dialogue across space. Hans Op de Beeck at his solo exhibition "Vanishing," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2023. Entering the gallery’s signature main hall on the first floor, we found a specially partitioned gray display room, with pale gray walls and hard-edged plaster trim made to resemble wooden slats. The overall effect was unified and calm.
The thirteen large watercolors shown in this display room are all new works from 2023. Though they appear gray, they are the result of the artist painting in black while leaving the white of the paper exposed. Hans Op de Beeck, "Wild Ocean and Stars," 2023. Hans Op de Beeck, "Winter Walk," 2023. “I use black and white to present a fantastical world.
I paint using only black pigment. All the white is simply the white of the paper itself.” The precision and command are astonishing. Op de Beeck said the works he is happiest with are the two mesmerizing scenes of snow and sea, where the layers of snow on the trees and the repeated folds of the waves echo each other in a strangely exact way.
“You can let your mind wander freely and allow the image to take you wherever you want to go.” Hans Op de Beeck solo exhibition "Vanishing," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2023. The artist told us that when he paints these watercolors, he can become almost feverish, sometimes working from eight in the evening until eight the next morning. His habit of losing himself in drawing goes back to childhood.
“All the kids at school loved playing soccer, but I was a bit bookish. I only wanted to read novels and draw. Things were rather complicated in my family when I was young, so books and painting became like an island for me, a place where I could immerse myself and escape into a little world of my own,” he said. Hans Op de Beeck, "Blackberries," 2023. Hans Op de Beeck solo exhibition "Vanishing," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2023. At the far end of the first floor, on the way to the second-floor gallery, stands a group of oversized blackberry sculptures tied to one of Op de Beeck’s earliest childhood memories.
“When I was a little boy, my brother and I often picked blackberries in the forest, and my mother would make jam with them. Even now, the first time I eat blackberries in season each year, I feel as if I’ve gone straight back to childhood.” Op de Beeck said that blackberries are like jewels growing in nature: so small, yet so perfectly formed, each little drupelet round and full, making them especially suited to sculpture.
“So I thought, why don’t I make one? Then one didn’t feel like enough, so I made three and pinned them to a base,” he said with a laugh. “Sometimes I think I’m terribly naive when I make art, almost like a child.” Hans Op de Beeck, left: "Wunderkammer (2)," 2018; right: "Wunderkammer (11)," 2020. Hans Op de Beeck solo exhibition "Vanishing," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2023. Upstairs, on either side of the two "Wunderkammer" works, are two differently themed galleries, both black boxes, each work lit only by a single white beam from above.
In the gallery to the left, a wall-mounted sculpture of a young couple is placed beside a sculpture depicting an elderly pair. Their emotional states differ, and the detail is extraordinarily fine, yet what moves the viewer is the very ordinariness of these small daily moments. Hans Op de Beeck solo exhibition "Vanishing," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2023. Hans Op de Beeck, "The Cliff (wall piece)," 2019. “This is a pair of fourteen-year-olds holding hands for the first time. You can see how awkward and clumsy the boy is.
I think everyone can relate to it and remember the first time they held hands or kissed. It’s foolish and abrupt, but also so sweet, simple, and everyday,” Op de Beeck said. Hans Op de Beeck, "Mum and Dad," 2019. Hans Op de Beeck solo exhibition "Vanishing," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2023. The elderly couple in bathrobes presents another state of intimacy. The way they stand looking up at the sky resembles those old married couples in an American TV series who hear a noise outside at midnight, throw on their robes, and rush out of the house to see what happened.
Their posture and expressions are almost identical; leaning into each other, they seem nearly to merge. It is so plain, and so warm. Hans Op de Beeck, "The Three Sisters," 2020. Hans Op de Beeck solo exhibition "Vanishing," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2023. There is always a curious tension in Op de Beeck’s work: it feels very real, yet also dreamlike; somewhat melancholy, yet unexpectedly funny.
“I actually love watching chickens. They’re very funny. You see them spending the whole day doing almost nothing, just eating, standing in front of the sand, pecking away, calm and content.” Hans Op de Beeck solo exhibition "Vanishing," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2023. Hans Op de Beeck, "Timo," 2018. His work also includes many images of animals and plants, serving as metaphors for human feelings and desires.
The peacock, for example, stands for vanity, while the crow suggests a more fable-like, fairy-tale quality.
“We often like to observe animals and then project human things onto them. You might think a dog looking into our eyes seems mournful and full of tears, terribly sad, but that may just be our own emotion,” Op de Beeck said. His work also often follows the tradition of still-life painting, using flowers to suggest beauty that is brief and a life that vanishes almost as soon as it appears.
“The moment you cut a flower and place it in a vase, you have put it in its grave, because it will die there. But it is also extremely beautiful.” Hans Op de Beeck solo exhibition "Vanishing," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2023. However lifelike and realistic his sculptures may be, he said he is not very interested in reproducing reality exactly.
“And my late father may walk into my dream as tall as a giant. I like mixing dreams with the real world. If I only copied reality, it would be terribly uninteresting,” Op de Beeck said. Hans Op de Beeck, "Silent Parade," Amos Rex Museum, Helsinki, Finland, 2023. In that respect, Op de Beeck has been fortunate as an artist. He has had the chance to realize his ideas about combining the real and the unreal in actual museums.
He built a full-scale carousel carved with elaborate Baroque ornament, effectively turning the museum into a vast amusement ground. Bamboo groves, sofas, rocks, and ponds were arranged together in a way that obeyed no obvious logic.
“Sometimes I’m especially drawn to things that are celebratory, Baroque, overdecorated, and amusing.” Hans Op de Beeck, "The Collector’s House," Art Basel, Switzerland, 2016. At an exhibition in Basel, Switzerland, in 2016, he built a huge “public library” in a space of 2500 square meters, complete with sofas, benches, an indoor pond thick with water lilies, and even a grand piano.
“I mixed things from 20s Europe with neoclassical decorative objects and columns. I invited viewers into the space to sit down and really ‘read’ those sculptures.” The artist said that in the space one can find very old objects, but also drink bottles, empty pizza boxes, and water guns. It is rather like a treasure hunt.
“You can imagine that perhaps a grandson threw a party in his grandfather’s house of collections? There may be more than one hundred and twenty such intriguing little stories in the scene. The more time you spend in it, the more you discover,” the artist said. Hans Op de Beeck, "We Are the Last People Left," Lyon Biennale, France, 2022. Op de Beeck’s rendering of classical-style sculpture is extraordinarily vivid, but he is equally attentive to contemporary social conditions.
At the 2022 Lyon Biennale in France, he built a real abandoned trailer park on a 2000-square-meter vacant site.
“The people who lived there may have been people who refused to participate in society. They simply lived on their own, grew vegetables, and carried out small religious rituals,” the artist said. As viewers walk through the installation, they can even detect traces of life; the whole park resembles a small utopian community, as if it had been “petrified and frozen” at the very moment it was abandoned. Hans Op de Beeck, "We Are the Last People Left," Lyon Biennale, France, 2022. “We see many people struggling to survive. Many have perfectly respectable jobs, but they live in trailers simply because they cannot afford a decent house.
In my home country, Belgium, for instance, there are also many refugees seeking political asylum.” Op de Beeck said that his original intention in making the installation was to ask how we relate to a world that has already been laid out for us. How do we agree or disagree with the way others live? What, exactly, is our position? Hans Op de Beeck, "Staging Silence," Herkenrode, Hasselt, Belgium, 2015. As our conversation with Op de Beeck drew to a close, we found ourselves quietly moved. Whether he is speaking about everyday life or social realities, he often seems to view them through a lens of tenderness touched with sadness.
You can feel, quite directly, his love of life and a stirring sense of responsibility toward the world as a whole.
“I’m just someone clumsily living my own life. I make disastrous mistakes, keep failing, and then perhaps create something beautiful. I’m not really qualified to tell other people that I have some wise experience to share, but I can be a companion in life and help people understand that they are not the only ones having difficulties or needing to overcome suffering.” Hans Op de Beeck, "Dance" (video work), 2013. He said with a smile that he hopes his art can comfort people who are seeking solace and support.
“The reason I chose to become an artist was that I wanted to do something constructive, to create something of value, something that would allow people to see their own lives.” Image courtesy of the artist’s studio and Galleria Continua; photographs by Dayu and Wang Qingxu.