Paris Internationale 2026: Paris

Don Gallery is pleased to announce its fourth participation in Paris Internationale, taking place from October 19–24, 2026, where it will present a duo project, Floating Beings - by artists Luc Ming YAN and LIN Shan at Booth B1.08. 

Departing from a clearly defined narrative, the project takes shape as a perceptual structure that gradually unfolds. Living beings, plants, and drifting fields of color draw close, intersect, linger, and continually shift across the pictorial space. The works of LIN Shan and Luc Ming YAN share a certain lightness and instability. The “beings” that inhabit their paintings are not representations of the visible world, but presences that seem to emerge somewhere between nature, allegory, and psychological experience. Soft and elusive, they occasionally reveal moments of humor and intimacy, while remaining accompanied by an unease that resists articulation.

LIN Shan’s paintings possess an almost humid softness. Flowers, foliage, and natural landscapes draw close, intertwine, and grow into one another, forming complex and subtle relationships between intimacy and restraint. Nature is never merely a backdrop; it gradually becomes an extension of the body and of emotion. Rather than depicting desire directly, LIN allows the “characters” within her paintings to inhabit particular bodily gestures. Through leaning, stretching, lingering, and withdrawing, they reveal the vulnerability, solitude, and sense of displacement that accompany the individual’s encounter with reality. Expansive horizons and illusionistic spaces reminiscent of Surrealism further widen the distance between reality and perception, allowing a subtle yet persistent sense of disequilibrium to linger beneath the paintings’ soft surfaces.

Luc Ming Yan, meanwhile, has long moved along the threshold between abstraction and figuration, constructing visual worlds that remain unfinished and continually in the process of becoming. Cats, mythological figures, and mutated creatures drift through fields of color, contours, and rapid brushstrokes, as though they have only just taken shape and are already on the verge of dissolving. Images no longer assume fixed identities, but resemble temporary constellations of life: migrating, escaping, and mutating, they retain their uncertainty through an ongoing process of emergence and dispersal.

The beings that drift across their paintings move restlessly between reality and imagination, body and nature, formation and dissolution. They resist being fully named, nor do they need to be anchored to any fixed meaning. Perhaps it is precisely within this state of incompletion and instability that the image moves beyond the mere representation of reality, allowing a certain spirit to emerge from life in its continual becoming and flux.