Feng Xiao-Min’s ‘Sailing Through the Light’ Illuminates the Soul at Opera Gallery New York
Source: Opera Gallery New York
Reported By: Brandon Travin
April 2025 — In a city that moves at breakneck speed, Opera Gallery New York invites its patrons to slow down and drift—if only momentarily—into the quiet, luminous world of Feng Xiao-Min. The Paris-based artist’s latest exhibition, ‘Sailing Through the Light,’ opens on April 22 and runs through May 17, showcasing 26 paintings that span over a decade of work, from 2009 through 2025.
Curated with intentional restraint and emotional clarity, the exhibition unfolds as a visual meditation—one that offers stillness in a time of endless noise. With compositions that evoke the shimmering calm of sea and sky, Feng explores light not only as a physical presence but as a philosophical force, often balancing its symbolic duality: hope and anxiety.
A Journey Through Light and Space
At the heart of this body of work is Feng’s deep engagement with nature, both seen and felt. These aren’t literal landscapes, but internal terrains shaped by memory and mood—imaginative voyages where the horizon dissolves into abstraction, and time is suspended.
In Composition N°26.7.21 (2021), deep midnight blues envelop the canvas like an ocean at night. Two small lights flicker in the distance, guiding the viewer forward like lighthouses or distant boats. The stillness is charged, contemplative, hinting at solitude without despair.
Elsewhere, in Composition N°6.4.23 (2023), warm ochres and indigo flow into one another like the final moments of sunset. The presence of coastlines and mountain silhouettes draws the viewer closer, evoking a scene that is both elusive and familiar—a dream recalled just before waking.
The Art of Emotional Abstraction
Born in Shanghai in 1959 and now based in France, Feng Xiao-Min bridges Eastern philosophy and Western abstraction with elegant fluidity. Trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he would later teach, Feng has developed a painterly language that draws equally from traditional Chinese calligraphy and modern European technique.
His method is meticulous yet intuitive. Acrylic is treated like ink—manipulated with water and gesture in the same way a calligrapher would shape characters on rice paper. Each stroke reflects years of discipline, yet no work feels rigid. Instead, they breathe with movement and meditative rhythm.
Feng’s influences range widely—from Qing Dynasty master Shitao to Turner’s atmospheric landscapes to Zao Wou-Ki’s lyrical abstractions—but his voice remains singular. He paints not to represent, but to evoke.
“Light, for me, has a duality—it represents both hope and anxiety. That tension plays out across the entire exhibition in compositions that oscillate between clarity and mystery, presence and disappearance.
Feng Xiao-Min
More Than a Show, a Sanctuary
As cultural institutions increasingly explore how art can serve as a space for reflection and wellness, ‘Sailing Through the Light’ offers a timely response. It’s a show not designed to dazzle, but to soothe, center, and slow the mind. In the gallery’s quiet corners, surrounded by vast canvases bathed in indigo, ochre, and fog-like gray, the outside world seems to fall away.
Opera Gallery, which has championed modern and contemporary voices globally since its founding in 1994, continues to demonstrate its dedication to showcasing artists who transcend aesthetic trends in favor of emotional resonance. Feng Xiao-Min’s work does just that.