Short Bio

Ragnhild Nes is a Norwegian visual artist working in painting, drawing, and sculpture. Her work unfolds through abstraction, where color, form, and light are layered with influences from her surroundings, cultural encounters, myths, and art historical references. Nes explores how experience, memory, and history can be transformed into compositions that are both tactile and poetic. 

Writing is integral to her process: each work begins with words on the blank surface. Sometimes they are hidden beneath layers of paint, like traces of memory, while at other times they resurface in titles, colours, structures, or as stitched sentences across the canvas. In this way, language becomes inseparable from the visual, creating works where meaning emerges gradually through depth and layering.

Nes has exhibited both in Norway and internationally. This marks her first exhibition in Beijing. She will also participate in a duo exhibition with the Chinese artist GOES at Wuhan。

https://ragnhildnes.com/

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ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

This exhibition is jointly organized by the People’s Art Media and the Embassy of Norway in China. Established in 2008, the People’s Art Office is a professional cultural institution committed to supporting artists, advancing cross-cultural artistic exchange, and safeguarding and promoting intangible cultural heritage and outstanding traditional Chinese culture. As a dedicated platform for Sino-Norwegian artistic dialogue, it has consistently facilitated collaborative projects and mutual learning between the two countries. The exhibition will be held at the People’s Art office gallery in Beijing, opening on June 5, 2026. Under the shared belief that art transcends national boundaries and that cultural exchange fuels creative innovation, this exhibition serves not only as a curated presentation of contemporary artistic practice but also as a meaningful platform for deepening bilateral cultural understanding, fostering mutual appreciation, and strengthening long-term cooperation between China and Norway.

In this context, curator Leyla Kirem will facilitate an in-depth cultural and artistic exchange between Ragnhild Nes and local Chinese artists. Simultaneously, Ragnhild Nes will closely observe the processes of creation and framing in Chinese calligraphy, while gaining insight into the philosophical concept of harmony between humanity and nature that is central to Chinese art. Through this immersive engagement, spanning exhibition halls and creative studios, Ragnhild Nes will not only experience the enduring vitality of Chinese art, but also uncover new avenues for creative inspiration and foster future collaboration between Chinese and Norwegian artists.

Ragnhild Nes will exhibit a series of paintings developed during her residency at the historic studio and former home of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944), one of the central figures of European modernism. Munch’s practice was mainly within painting. He established a deeply influential visual language rooted in psychological intensity and expressive use of color. Works such as The Scream, The Sick Child, Madonna, and The Sun reflect his exploration of inner states through radical painterly means.

In fall 2025, Nes was granted a residency at Munch’s former home and studio at Ekely in Oslo. The site carries a layered history: a place where Munch lived and worked for nearly three decades, developing his late practice between enclosed studio spaces and outdoor environments, often allowing weather, time, and repetition to shape the surface of his works. Within this context, Nes worked directly in both the Winter Studio and the outdoor studio's paces, engaging with Ekely not only as a historical site but as a living environment of artistic production

From this residency emerged a body of work that forms the foundation of this exhibition. Nes developed what she refers to as the “red series,” in which painting becomes a site of encounter between multiple registers of meaning: the material memory of Ekely, the historical presence of Munch’s painterly language, and the cultural symbolism of red within Chinese visual and social traditions. Rather than isolating red as a fixed motif, Nes works across a broader field, allowing color to function as a shifting structure through which perception is continually reconfigured.

Within the exhibition, color operates as a site where different histories are told on thesurface. Red emerges not only as pigment but as an operative condition, at once material presence, emotional charge, and cultural signifier. In Edvard Munch’s practice, color functions as an expressive and psychological force that exceeds descriptive representation, while in Chinese cultural contexts red carries associations of vitality, prosperity, protection, and renewal. Nes works within this tension, allowing these registers to remain active and unresolved, where meaning is produced through oscillation rather than synthesis. And the energy of the vibrant color red is felt in the brushstrokes, not limited to only the color red.

The exhibition title, Red Red, Fire Fire (红红火火), is drawn from a widely used Chinese expression describing a state of flourishing life experienced in brightness, warmth, and momentum. The repetition of “red” and “fire” intensifies this sense of expansion and vitality. The title functions less as reference than as atmospheric framing, situating the exhibition within a field in which color operates as a carrier of cultural memory, affect, and transformation.

The exhibition includes, among other works, a triptych in oil and mixed media on canvas. Across its three panels, references to the blood moon and blood sun emerge as recurring motifs, developed initially during outdoor painting at Ekely and further expanded in Nes’ studio in winter/spring 2026.

The work is extended into space through an accompanying wall installation of wooden cut letters, combining references to Norwegian wood with the Chinese phrase “red red fire fire.” Together, the elements and paintings operate as a spatial and linguistic translation between contexts, where material, language, and cultural signifiers are brought into tension ratherthan resolution.