SPURS Gallery is pleased to announce A Sun Mountain, artist Hou Zichao’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Opening on July 4, 2026, it presents over a dozen recent paintings across the gallery’s three dedicated spaces, Gallery I, II & III.
Hou Zichao’s painting practice continues to revolve around landscape, yet the scenes he depicts rarely correspond to any actual location. Instead, they resemble fragments left behind by various experiences: mountain ranges glimpsed during travels, screenshots from social media, volcanoes from childhood memory, and images whose origins are difficult to trace. These elements enter the canvases all at once, and through constant overlaying and shifting, they form a landscape that remains perpetually in flux.
In A Sun Mountain, eruption and dormancy, day and night, coexist. Fragments of different times and geographies overlap, scattered with subtle signals, glimmers of light, and mementos. It resembles neither memory nor prophecy, but rather an emotion whose source cannot be identified, slowly diffusing in silence.
This new body of work extends Hou Zichao’s focus on the process of a painting’s formation. It does not point to mere techniques, but rather approaches a sustained observation of how images are simultaneously constructed and dissolved. Spray guns, rollers, stencils, and brushstrokes each leave their mark, layering over and revealing one another. The image gradually takes shape through covering and exposing, never fixed into a definitive structure. The texts, graphics, and directional signs contribute to this generative process. Instead of serving as explanations, they suggest an alternative way of reading the landscape across the works.
A Sun Mountain may not be a real mountain. It is more like a persistent imaginary—one where eruption and dormancy, day and night, remain together, and where faint lights never die out.
The exhibition runs through August 16, 2026.
About the Artist
Hou Zichao (b. 1988, Shanxi, China) received his BA Honors degree from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London in 2012 and his Master’s degree from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London in 2013. He now lives and works in Beijing, China.
Hou Zichao’s recent solo exhibitions include A Sun Mountain, SPURS Gallery, Beijing (2026); Fruit Hunting, SPURS Gallery, Beijing (2024); Fallen Lush Racing Share, Tara Downs, New York (2023); Practice Land, Cans Project, Taipei (2023); Child in the Woods, SPURS Gallery, Beijing (2022); Everlasting, Downs & Ross, New York (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Light Chase: Special Exhibition for the Year of the Horse, Gravity Art Museum, Beijing (2025); Inside the Frame: Twenty Years in Focus, SPURS Gallery, Beijing (2025); Here, Where, There?, Almine Rech, Shanghai (2024); Weaving in Entanglement, Mending in Punctures, 69 Art Campus, Beijing (2024); Bordercrossing: Possibilities and Interactions, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Crossing Frontiers, Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv (2023); The Disconnected Generation, Song Art Museum, Beijing (2022); The Glass Bead Game, MAMOTH, London (2021); LOVE LOVE LOVE: Intimate, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2018); Elite Young Artists Program, Rightview Art Museum, Beijing/Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen (2016).
Hou Zichao’s works are held in collections including the Long Museum in Shanghai, Yuz Museum in Shanghai, Song Art Museum in Beijing, He Art Museum in Foshan, Zhuzhong Art Museum in Beijing, Aurora Museum in Shanghai, Tiantai Art Collection in Qingdao, Shenzhen Qianhai Taikang Hospital in Shenzhen, Hort Family Collection in New York, Nassima Landau Foundation in Tel Aviv, AAC Foundation in Beijing, and The Soil Collection in Beijing, among others.
