Ding Shilun: painting the present as a personal mythology

At first glance, Ding Shilun’s paintings are seductive. Pale colours, elegant figures, vegetation, costumes, animals, and almost translucent surfaces create worlds in which the eye could wander indefinitely. Then something changes. A skull appears, a body takes on an impossible pose, or a cartoon character encounters a mythological creature. The scene is no longer reassuring. Born in Guangzhou in 1998 and working between London and China, Shilun uses precisely this tension to explore the absurdity of everyday life, mixing personal experience, art history, and visual cultures that might otherwise seem far apart.

Francisco Goya and Japanese animation, ancient Chinese legends and Disney, Gustav Klimt, fashion, advertising, and cinema can all coexist within Shilun’s paintings. In Spectres in Rehearsal, presented by Bernheim in Zurich in 2026, Cinderella, the Cookie Monster, and anime references entered compositions structured around the tradition of grand history painting. This is not quotation for its own sake. Shilun belongs to a generation raised within a global archive of images, where high culture, memes, films, religion, and personal memories can occupy the same plane. His paintings make this condition visible.

Shilun describes his narratives as “personal fables.” Their protagonists are not characters to be decoded through a precise storyline, but projections of different parts of himself. Living between cultures and systems of reference therefore enters directly into the paintings. Speaking to W Magazine, the artist described the figures in his works as embodiments of his own experience, while at ICA Miami he framed them as projections shaped in part by the confusion of living across different ideologies. Mythology thus becomes a tool for transforming difficult-to-define emotions into images that can be shared.

This ambiguity is particularly visible in Hunter’s Whistle from 2024. An androgynous figure plays a flute amid delicate vegetation, wearing a corset and carrying a crossbow. Nearby sits a human skull. Shilun has described his practice as a “sugar-coated bullet”: something that initially appears sweet and fragile before revealing something disturbing beneath the surface. It is a useful way to understand much of his work. Beauty attracts the viewer; unease makes them stay long enough to question what they are actually seeing.

Behind the apparent freedom of these compositions lies an intensely controlled process. Raised in a family connected to painting and educated at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, the Slade School of Fine Art, and London’s Royal College of Art, Shilun looks to traditional Chinese techniques without simply reproducing their appearance. He dilutes oil paint into thin, translucent layers that recall the behaviour of ink and water-based pigments on paper. Across his large canvases, this technical lightness contrasts with densely populated scenes filled with details and simultaneous perspectives.

In 2026, this practice reached a new scale. Following his first US museum solo exhibition at ICA Miami, Shilun presented Apocrypha 未入典 at Beijing’s Song Art Museum, his largest presentation to that point and his first museum solo show in Asia. The project began with the idea of apocrypha: stories excluded from official canons, whose authority may be uncertain but which can therefore generate alternative interpretations. It marks an important shift. The artist’s personal mythology begins to extend beyond individual identity, becoming a reflection on how history is constructed, what we choose to remember, and how many narratives inevitably remain outside the centre.

The significance of Ding Shilun’s practice does not simply lie in combining East and West. That would be too easy a reading. What matters is that no culture remains isolated within his work. Images arrive simultaneously from family memory, painting history, a film, the internet, or an object encountered in everyday life. This may be one of the defining visual conditions of the present: we live surrounded by references belonging to different places and periods, continuously creating new connections between them. Shilun does not attempt to impose definitive order on that chaos. He turns it into painting. Perhaps this is why his scenes, although entirely imagined, can feel strangely familiar.