Northing Space (NO)

Northing Space is the exhibition venue of Northing—Centre for East Asian Art and Culture in Bergen, Norway.

In Norway, Northing seeks to enrich the diversity of cultural life by opening a sustained window onto contemporary art and culture from East Asia. Through a cross-disciplinary programme encompassing exhibitions, publications, and public events, Northing engages Norwegian audiences with artistic practices and cultural perspectives that are otherwise rarely encountered locally.

Internationally, Northing creates platforms for direct dialogue and collaboration between Norwegian artists and their counterparts in East Asia, encouraging reciprocal exchange and long-term professional relationships.

Østre Skostredet 10
Bergen, 2017
Norway
+47 45 07 42 63

post@northing.no
northing.no/

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Curated for
CHART

Northing presents a two-person exhibition featuring the prominent Chinese photographer Lin Zhipeng (No.223) and the Oslo-based painter Jinbin Chen. Both artists explore fleeting intimacy and the fragile yet persistent vitality of youth through contrasting mediums and visual languages.

Lin works with bold immediacy, intuitively capturing atmospheres and emotional undercurrents that often escape the visible surface. Jinbin employs a subdued yet idiosyncratic palette, rendering bodies and psychological tensions with quiet intensity. Transcending cultural origins without relying on them as narrative anchors, the two artists together form a resonant visual duet on the enduring motif of youth.

Jinbin Chen (CN)

Chen describes his practice as encounters between bodies, images, histories, narratives, and moments that may seem fleeting yet hold the potential to transform intimacy, becoming, and belonging. Desire, gender temperament, power hierarchy, and the politics of intimacy remain central to his work, rooted in lived experience yet expanded into collective imaginaries. Painting has been the core of his practice in recent years. His portraits often depict friends, imagined figures, or fragmented bodies in states of openness, vulnerability, or anonymity. Through these figures, Chen constructs an erotic language that is sensuous without being explicit.

Jinbin Chen (b.1994, China) lives in Oslo. MFA Oslo National Academy of the Arts. BFA Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Work held in the collections of Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Denver Art Museum, Denver, Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney National Museum Norway, Oslo etc.

Confrontation 2

Oil on stretched canvas
2026

Courtesy of the artist and Northing Space

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Glandular Pads

Oil on stretched canvas
2025

Courtesy of the artist and Northing Space

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A Dream Within a Dream

Oil on stretched canvas
2025

Courtesy of the artist and Northing Space

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Encounter Underwater

Oil on canvas
2025

Courtesy of the artist and Hua International

Stay

Oil on canvas
2025

Courtesy of the artist and Hua International

Untitled

Oil on canvas
2025

Courtesy of the artist and Hua International

Eudaimonia

Oil on linen
2026

Courtesy of the artist and Northing Space

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Reaffirming His Object Status as the Beloved 2

Oil on linen
2026

Courtesy of the artist and Northing Space

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Portrait of Jinbin Chen

Courtesy of the artist and Northing. Photo by Niklas Hart

Lin Zhipeng (No.223) (CN)

Lin Zhipeng (No.223) is a pivotal figure among the generation of Chinese artists who emerged internationally in the early 2000s. His diaristic yet carefully composed photographs trace the emotional texture of youth in contemporary China, where tradition and rapid social change coexist in tension. Oscillating between tenderness and detachment, intimacy and estrangement, his images reveal the desires and uncertainties of a generation seeking freedom. Balancing improvisation with deliberate staging, Lin transforms everyday bodies, objects, and interiors into charged, lyrical studies of presence and vulnerability.

Lin Zhipeng (a.k.a No.223, b.1979, China), photographer based in Beijing. No.223‘s works in Museum collection: La MEP (Paris, France), The Walther Collection (Ulm, Germany), Musée de la Photographie, (Charleroi, Belgium), Spencer Museum of Art (KS，USA), White Rabbit Museum (Sydney, Australia), Franciscans Museum (Deauville, France).