In Espace Culturel ICICLE – Paris
35 Avenue George V, Paris VIII
Opening Monday 12 October, 18.00 – 20.00
Until March 15th 2027
Monday to Saturday, 11:00 – 19:00
Word from the curator
In autumn 2026, ICICLE Cultural Space in Paris presents En chemin, Luo Mingjun’s first solo exhibition in France. A historic figure in the Chinese avant-garde of the 1980s, Luo Mingjun co-founded Group O in 1985, one of the earliest experimental collectives of the period. She was one of the very few women among this pioneering generation of artists who, by breaking away from the ideological and aesthetic frameworks of the period, dominated by Socialist Realism, laid the foundations of contemporary Chinese art.
From her earliest experiments within Group O, Luo Mingjun has continually pushed the boundaries of her practice. Painting, drawing, ink, video, installation and interventions in space: no medium constitutes a fixed territory for her. This freedom to move between forms, inseparable from a persistent refusal of imposed identities and categories, runs through her entire body of work. Her move to Switzerland in 1987 sharpened this impulse: never to allow herself to be confined by a form, an identity or a sense of belonging.
“While Luo Mingjun’s practice spans a wide range of media, painting occupies a central place within it. En chemin is devoted entirely to this medium. Through a deliberately pared-down vocabulary — a cloud, a bowl, a pin, a flower, a figure — Luo Mingjun conjures, from almost nothing, an astonishing density of meaning. This economy of motifs is matched by a singular and highly accomplished pictorial practice, built through layering, transparency, emergence and erasure. Presence and disappearance, memory and forgetting, displacement and freedom intersect in works that appear spare yet are complex in their construction, driven by the same necessity: to keep moving forward, without ever allowing the destination to precede the path.”
— Myriam Kryger, curator of the exhibition