In the exhibition hall, Lin Aojie stimulates an in-house display design humorously and thoughtfully: in front of a cosy sofa, there is a television playing video clip of the artist having conversations with curator, writer Miao Zijin. As the Chinese title “Yue Xiu” suggests, which is actually the name of a district in Guangzhou, Lin tries to reflect Guangdong’s contemporary art scene through his own path of art learning.

The transition between privacy and publicity is highly recognisable in Lin’s mouse paintings on computer. He carefully arranges all kinds of interesting images in one piece of work, looking forward to surprising the audience with a strong visual impact. In the large-scale painting framed with a wooden box, Lin collects a wide range of artworks that impressed him most, in order to state his own perspective of the thirty-year Chinese contemporary art history, while challenging the largest group show of contemporary art from China ever in the U.S., “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Besides, the text work “The Story of Art” sincerely advises local organisations and art professionals to shorten the distance between art and the public. It is worth noticing that this proposal was successfully implemented at the first Airport Biennale in Guangzhou, China.

As the English exhibition title says, “Designers have a future only when they treat artworks as initial inspiration”, Lin Aojie also wanders around the intersections between art, design and popular culture. The artist creates a series of animal stickers for five spaces of ShanghART Gallery in Shanghai, Beijing and Singapore. They can be seen as mascots, which are associated with the exterior and function of different spaces, and appear in corresponding locations with this solo exhibition. Resonating with other exhibits, they not only highlight the artist's open and diverse ideas, but also act as a subtle catalyst for the viewer's imagination.