
ShanghART Beijing is delighted to present a solo exhibition by Lin Aojie Ponzi Scheme, opening on 20 May 2023. Following the artist’s two solo shows in Beijing Those Who Like Playing Tricks Usually Don’t Live a Good Life (2019) and How Do Artists Make a Living (2021), this exhibition marks the third chapter of Lin’s artistic practice by bringing together his latest video, painting and text works.
Featuring casual and witty pop culture references, Lin Aojie’s work is known for exposing the artist’s plight and grey areas within the art industry in a seemingly light-hearted manner. In recent years, Lin has broadened his interests to include social reality and artificial intelligence. Drawing attention to the economic realm for this exhibition, he attempts to examine the inextricable, ambiguous relationship between artistic production and commercial development, as well as the intertwined yet evolving human desires in the information age through his usual self-deprecating interventions.
As a conceptually oriented artist, Lin Aojie is keen to set all kinds of ingenious traps in the exhibition - the title of which is not translatable from Chinese to English, for example - telling the ‘truth’ beneath the glamorous capital market in a sincere one, when consumerism and commercial operations have become an unavoidable global context, he takes advantage of the ‘industrialisation of art’ as a future trend to consider the possibilities of creating more access to conetmporary art for the general public.
Lin Aojie was born in Guangzhou in 1986 and graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Oil Painting Department in 2010. He currently lives and works in Guangzhou. Presented through video, photography, painting, text, etc., Lin has a delicate record of the trivial details of daily life or deliberately planned events with strongly improvisatory and humorous images. By beating around the bush he tries to question, ridicule and criticise the capitalist mode of production, artist’s survival predicament and the relationship between artists and other art professionals.


ShanghART gallery was initiated in 1996 in Shanghai. It has since grown to become one of China’s most influential art institutions and a vital resource to the development of contemporary art in China with two spaces in 50 Moganshan Road (Main Space and H-Space), a public warehouse space in West of Shanghai (ShanghART Taopu), and a gallery space in Beijing and representing over 40 artists.
Being recognized for its importance ShanghART became the initial gallery from China participating in major international art fairs like Art Basel and Fiac, Paris. ShanghART gallery also enjoys the great respect of being among the 75 most influencial galleries selected in Thames & Hudson’s publication ‘International Art Galleries: Post-war to Post-millennium.’

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