Vanguard Gallery is pleased to present “Landescape” by multidisciplinary artist Ella Wang Olsson, featuring a new body of cross-media video and sound installations alongside paintings. As a member of Gen Z, having grown up navigating this fractured reality and the collision of divergent value systems, Ella Wang Olsson’s practice, stemming from inquiries into escapism and belonging, revolves around the question: how can we truly be free today?

The title “Landescape” merges the words “landscape” and “escape”, framing the ongoing research project in Ella’s practice to investigate celebration, the collective body and escapism. The exhibition opens on 17 January 2026, marks Ella’s first solo presentation at the gallery.

“Landescape” begins with Ella’s long-term reflection on the archaic practice of celebration. Viewed through the parallel lenses of Daoism and rave culture, celebration is understood not merely as leisure or entertainment, but as a ritualised suspension of order. It is a way to escape from the stale and repetitive patterns of everyday life, opening up a healing interval in which the present moment is released from the demand to produce value or meaning.

The video installation “Landescape” that shares the same name with the exhibition was developed from Ella’s previous performance at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art. Drawing from Daoist notions of the body as a landscape, and Georges Bataille’s writings on collective celebration as a means of reintroducing the sacred into everyday life, Ella frames the party as a site where belonging and escapism collide. It is a space of harmonious chaos—a lawless union, a temporary manifesto—that captures the unease of being together in an age of mass individualism. Here, escapism reveals its dual nature: it may dissolve into passive withdrawal, or evolve into an active force of healing and creation.

The paintings presented in the exhibition belong to the same evolving series exploring the spirit of the party. Each canvas captures a fleeting moment of chaotic revelry, rendered through a complex, layered surface built by repeated gestures of wiping and erasure. This series is deeply inspired by the cave paintings of Dunhuang and Daoist understandings of chaos as fluid, formless and rich with potential. As bodies converge and dissolve in the scene, individuality gives way to a collective presence, and the human figure is absorbed into the landscape itself.

“Landescape” proposes a temporal escape to the viewer. Upon entering, one may find the way to reconnects with the body, reclaims collective experience, and momentarily touches a form of freedom that remains elusive, but urgently necessary.