HdM Gallery presents Thin air, a solo exhibition by Deng Yuanchu opening on November 7, 2026, in the gallery’s Square Room in Beijing. Marking the artist’s first solo presentation at HdM Gallery, the exhibition brings together key works created over the past two years from two series, Flat mountain and Strange night. Moving between the distinct temporal realms of daylight and night, the works evoke the hazy expansiveness of high-altitude landscapes and experiences that feel at once unfamiliar and profoundly real.

The exhibition’s ink works draw on Deng Yuanchu’s two journeys to Tibet, translating her direct encounters with specific places into visual explorations of perception and memory. From earthen walls built along temple slopes and snowfields shaped by ancient glaciers to the snow-covered terrain of the Tanggula Mountains and distant peaks glimpsed from an airplane, these landscapes emerge from the artist’s physical experience of moving through unfamiliar environments. Rather than idealising the grandeur of the plateau, Deng focuses on its more subtle and fleeting impressions.

In Flat mountain, the apparent contradiction between mountain and flatness becomes a way to explore how terrain, natural processes, emotional perception and different viewpoints shape the act of looking. In Strange night, compositions become increasingly pared back, with broad planes of form and sharp contrasts of light and shadow evoking the dizziness, visual haze and uncertainty associated with high altitudes. Across both series, Deng moves away from the romanticism traditionally associated with mountain landscapes, capturing instead a sense of coldness and estrangement through images suspended between physical textures, unfamiliar topographies and indistinct memories.