When the Monsoon Turns East

SOOFA SUHE presents When the Monsoon Turns East, a solo exhibition by emerging artist Jiaqi Lyu, curated by Faithe Yang and Zicheng Bian. Treating the EastAsian winter monsoon (here used as a curatorial metaphor), this exhibition focuses on the southward Siberian winter monsoon across Northeast China and features paintings derived from regional archival images. These artworks assemble a northern visual vocabulary shaped by lived reality and the metaphors of power.

“Monsoon to the South” refers to the region’s entangled geographies and histories. Northeast China is home to many peoples with shared Tungusic roots; carried by the southbound Siberian monsoon, they once migrated with the harshest north winds of winter. For the Northeast, this monsoon is both a source of physical cold and a sign that reaches back to ancestral ground. It signals a specific narrative often hidden beneath grand histories. It also brings into view subjects relegated to the edges of the map, which in the artist’s paintings appear as images made passive by multiple constraints.

In popular retellings, an east wind in midwinter is treated as an anomaly. In meteorological terms, however, an easterly over the northern plains can follow the passage of a cold front when airflows from elsewhere disturb the local system. A wind widely thought not to belong to winter, therefore signals, at a subjective level, the odd dual vantage from which the Northeast has been seen in history. The painted images that Lyu presents take part in this play of shifting winds, opening a reflection on how external forces become internalised.

The practice of Jiaqi often explores the eerie interval between histories suspended in memory and futures that risk being forgotten. When archival and everyday images return, ghostlike, within her paintings, the certainties that guide habitual viewing begin to loosen. These unstable apparitions and subtle visual distortions are folded into a more situated artistic language. The approach suggests the blurred, archived condition of once-solid things as they weather under the larger currents of history.

Artist

Lyu Jiaqi

‍

Exhibition Date

19 December 2025 - 11 January 2026

‍

Venue

Suhe Haus 2F, 30 Wen'an Road, Jing'an District, Shanghai

‍