La Ville in Rome: Exhibiting at Between States

May 25, 2026|Hua Jing Li

Medina Art Gallery, Rome

Earlier this month I had the privilege of showing La Ville as part of Between States.

A group exhibition curated by Giulia Majer and Mariacarmela Mazzeo at Medina Art Gallery, Via Angelo Poliziano 32–34, Rome.

The show ran from 15 to 21 May 2026, bringing together emerging and established artists in an open dialogue about the conditions of contemporary artistic practice — a fluid space of crossing, where languages, materials, and perspectives interweave. It felt like exactly the right home for La Ville

La Ville began with a simple observation: water doesn't just reflect — it transforms.

Reflections within the painting dissolve the boundary between the solid and the fluid, between what is observed and what is imagined.

The composition is deliberately constructed to pull the viewer inward via a narrowing canal, drawing the eye deeper into the scene.

Perspective here becomes an invitation — not simply to look at a place, but to step into it and inhabit it.

That openness is entirely intentional. Each viewer arrives carrying their own narrative, their own sense of what unfolds beyond the frame. The specific gives way to the personal, and the painting becomes a shared space between artist and audience. It is finished, and yet never quite complete — which felt deeply in keeping with the spirit of Between States itself.

The Exhibition

Between States was conceived as a territory rather than a destination: a place where works sit at the threshold between process and completion, between the raw and the resolved, between the intimate and the collective, between the visible and the invisible. That ambiguity is generative, not unresolved. The works on show — spanning painting, photography, digital practice, installation, and sculpture — were in constant conversation, and La Ville found unexpected resonance with pieces exploring similar tensions of presence and perception.

A Permanent New Home

After the exhibition closed, La Ville found its permanent residence at Belsiana House, a boutique guesthouse tucked just steps from the Spanish Steps in the heart of Rome. Situated on the quiet Via Belsiana — a stone's throw from the Piazza di Spagna, Via Condotti, and the Trevi Fountain — it is a space of elegant calm amid one of the world's most storied neighbourhoods. There is something fitting about La Ville living here: a painting about the act of inhabiting a place, now permanently inhabiting one.