Nightime Playground by Yizhen Shen

Nightime Playground by Yizhen Shen | April 11, 5pm

This week-long exhibition features a group of paintings completed by @yizhen_shenn during a two-month residency at ArthereIstanbul.

Each painting emerges through a call-and-response process driven by a sustained negotiation of color, shape, texture and their ever-shifting possibilities as vehicles for pleasure, wonder, reverence, humor and refusal. What may appear as swirling ribbons resembling Islamic calligraphy often reveals vistas into buried layers. In a time saturated with doom-and-gloom compulsions and endgame narratives, these paintings insist on exuberance, embracing an ungoverned joy of play, a queer imagination, and a commitment to long detours that wander off-beat. In this space, painting becomes a kind of nighttime playground. The night is dark, yet we side with play. After all, it is when the cats come out.

Join us for the opening!

Image: Yizhen Shen, Wayward Sutra, 2026

Acrylic on canvas