'When Words Become Images': Lu Dadong solo exhibition held in Beijing

Editor's note: "When Words Become Images," a solo exhibition by Lu Dadong, is now open at Space Station Gallery in Beijing's 798 Art District until Nov. 30. Curated by Fu Xiaodong, the show stages a sustained inquiry into the reciprocity of text and picture: large-format ink works, dispersed small canvases and seal-carving pieces propose a return to a premodern semiotic field in which inscription and image continually transmute into one another.

Taking its title from a mirrored proposition—words become images, images become words—the project examines the deep continuity in Chinese visual language. Drawing on classical precedents from bronzes to seal script as well as the scholarship of Yang Xiaoneng, the exhibition frames calligraphic practice as pictorial thinking. Lu's prints, scrolls and plaster seals articulate a discipline in which line, glyph and carved surface are mutually generative: the show is both a meditation on language and a contemporary gesture toward renewed visual-literary invention.

The exhibition banner for "When Words Become Images," a solo exhibition of works by Lu Dadong, at Space Station Gallery, Beijing's 798 Art District, Oct. 21, 2025. [Photo by Liu Ziying/China.org.cn]