[Ota Fine Arts Shanghai]: ¥ouada: Artificial Paradise

Welcome to Artificial Paradise, an online viewing room accompanying ¥ouada’s second solo exhibition with Ota Fine Arts. Featuring new paintings by the Chinese artist ¥ouada (b. 1987, Fujian), this presentation builds on his earlier online viewing room Artificial Nature and continues his ongoing investigation into the relationship between the “natural” and the “constructed”. 

^{About Exhibition：Artificial Paradise}

Living in Hangzhou has shaped ¥ouada’s perception of nature as something increasingly poised between reality and careful beautification. In these works, landscapes and everyday scenes become sites where the organic and the artificial quietly converge, revealing a world in which the “natural” is continually arranged, edited, and reconstructed.

Across the works, animals repeatedly appear as intermediaries between reality and imagination. Rather than serving as straightforward depictions of nature, they are shaped by childhood memories, popular culture, folklore, documentaries, and digitally mediated images. Whether wandering through candy-coloured landscapes or inhabiting intimate domestic spaces, these creatures become projections of human perception, carrying emotions, desires, and fantasies that extend beyond the natural world.

"I don't paint animals as they are. I paint the emotions, memories, and desires we project onto them."    — ¥ouada, 2026

Within these constructed landscapes, the notion of "paradise" is continuously loosened and rewritten.  Beneath the seemingly lightearted and playful surfaces, subtle traces of unease, desire, and absurdity emerge, causing the viewer to drift between pleasure and distortion. Under these polished and carefully constructed facades, "paradise" does not appear as a pure utopian ideal, but gradually reveals its ambiguity and contradictions as something that is artificially produced.