Meet Shuo Hao: The Rising Artist Blending Myth, Memory, and Mourning in Paris

This fall, Galerie Derouillon in Paris presents “Huile de vitre” (September 3–October 4, 2025), a singular exhibition by the Chinese-born, France-based artist Shuo Hao. The show is accompanied by a text by Victoria Jonathan. Bringing together painting, poetry, furniture, and found objects, the presentation unfolds as a symbolic rite, where image and language, matter and spirit, fracture and repair, all converge in a mutable and deeply personal universe.

“The presentation unfolds as a symbolic rite,” 

The title Huile de vitre literally “glass oil” is borrowed from an ancient belief recounted by philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938). Glass was once thought to contain fire, and “glass oil,” or vitriol, was considered a substance derived from it. For Hao, the expression becomes an alchemical metaphor, an imaginary transmutation where the solid and the fluid, the visible and the invisible, intermingle. Her exhibition takes this liminal zone as both material and method, proposing a poetic matrix where intuition precedes meaning, and where even the most fragile gesture might hold the promise of renewal.

A Domestic Cosmos in Motion

The exhibition space itself is conceived as an energetic map, inspired by the Yi Jing (Book of Changes), the Taoist text that envisions existence as perpetual transformation. Each of Hao’s works corresponds to one of the eight trigrams of the Yi Jing symbols composed of solid and broken lines that embody elemental and cosmic forces. In Huile de vitre, these forces are not didactic or fixed. Rather, the gallery becomes a shifting balance between Yin and Yang, fullness and emptiness, silence and resonance. Viewers are invited to wander through this reimagined domestic space, where objects and images operate as thresholds into unseen dimensions.

“The gallery becomes a shifting balance between Yin and Yang,”

Antique furniture and flea market finds, sometimes 18th century, sometimes seemingly worthless are dismantled and recomposed into totems, altars, or folding screens. A drawer becomes an ear; a table turns into a pedestal. These objects resist restoration and instead emerge transformed, imbued with memory and possibility. Hao describes herself as both interpreter and shaman, attentive to the secret lives of objects. The artist records fragments in old notebooks, invents fictions, and allows these narratives to resonate in space.

Between Myth and Mourning

If Hao’s vocabulary draws from Taoist philosophy, it also weaves together strands of Greek and Christian mythology. Across her canvases appear Persephone’s abduction, Saint Agatha’s martyrdom, Actaeon’s metamorphosis, Leda’s assault by Zeus transformed into a swan, or Icarus in mid-descent. Each reference points to rupture, sacrifice, or metamorphosis—the moments when form dissolves and something other, perhaps miraculous, takes hold.

“Each reference points to rupture, sacrifice, or metamorphosis,”

These mythic invocations are layered with Hao’s own biography, including the recent loss of her closest friend. The exhibition culminates in a three-panel folding screen dedicated to him, a number symbolic in Taoist thought as infinity, and a poignant reference to their shared birthday. Here, the ritual of Huile de vitre becomes explicitly funerary and commemorative, a space where grief finds presence and the dead accompany the living.

An Aesthetics of Emergence

Hao’s painting practice is one of sudden appearances. Motifs, hourglasses, pomegranates, sphinxes, serpents devouring their tails surface like visions, fragmentary yet charged. Her palette is lunar, made of milky whites, silvery grays, extinguished reds, and deep, nocturnal blues. These colors seem less applied than conjured, recalling the ornamental delicacy of 19th-century cameos as much as the dreamlike atmospheres of Magritte or Leonor Fini.

“Hao’s painting practice is one of sudden appearances,”

The imagery does not build linear narratives but dissolves and redistributes itself across the works. Orifices, shells, and half-open flowers punctuate surfaces like apertures into other worlds. Hao’s canvases become ritual sites where pain might transform into transfiguration, where fire remains latent, burning silently between apparition and erasure.

Language as Parallel Matter

Accompanying the exhibition is a collection of fifty short texts, also titled Huile de vitre, published in Mandarin and English. These writings are not explanatory commentaries but parallel layers of the work, each functioning like a symbolic fracture or an opening. Hao wields metaphor as both shield and key: “I wield metaphors to reveal the truth. Infinite metaphors. There will always be one able to reach one’s heart.”

“I wield metaphors to reveal the truth,”

Shuo Hao

Huile de vitre does not offer explanations or closed systems. It instead proposes a symbolic place of care, a kind of chapel without dogma. Within it, dislocated forms regain their force, silence resonates as much as image, and the gesture of making becomes a form of self-healing.

In a moment when contemporary art often grapples with spectacle and immediacy, Hao’s exhibition insists on slowness, subtlety, and the regenerative potential of metaphor. Her assemblages and paintings do not seek to console but to reconfigure, to allow loss to coexist with presence, and to suggest that in the fracture, in the glass itself, a glimmer always persists.

At Galerie Derouillon, Shuo Hao offers not merely an exhibition but an immersive rite, a meditation on metamorphosis, memory, and mourning. With Huile de vitre, she creates a space where poetry and painting interlace, where ancient myths intersect with personal grief, and where viewers are invited to step into thresholds of their own.

“In the fracture, in the glass itself, a glimmer always persists,”

Shuo Hao, “huile de vitre,” Galerie Derouillon, Paris, 2025; Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Derouillon, Paris, © Grégory Copitet.

Shuo Hao, “Offrande éternelle,” 2025, Huile sur bois, Oil on wood, 113,5 x 207 × 2,5 cm (paravent ouvert), 44 3/4 x 81 1/2 x 1 inches (opened screen); Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Derouillon, Paris, © Youna Virus.