Vanguard Gallery | Paris Internationale

Vanguard Gallery

Vanguard Gallery was founded in Shanghai in 2004 and is committed to advocating for visual artists from China, Asia, and internationally whose conceptual and experimental practices resonate with the contemporary condition. Over the past two decades, the gallery has discovered and supported a generation of artists who have helped define the contours of contemporary art in greater China, while championing international artists whose practices hold particular significance within their respective regions, generations, and mediums, fostering dialogue with the evolving art scenes of China and Asia. Grounded in an enduring commitment to its founding vision, Vanguard Gallery continues to sustain a dynamic and evolving program that remains attentive and responsive to emerging artistic developments and broader cultural currents.

B1–8, 9 Qufu Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai, China 200085

For Paris Internationale, Ella Wang Olsson brings together a body of work that forms a constellation of interconnected narratives in which dreams, landscapes, rituals, and popular culture become vehicles for examining how individuals navigate contemporary existence. Through a practice that is at once institutive, experimental, and cross-disciplinary, Ella Wang Olsson’s works propose a contemporary club culture and the rave as contemporary sites of ritual, collective learning, celebration, and transformation.

Ella Wang Olsson is a Chinese Swedish artist interested in the sacred, healing practices and escapism culture. Their multidisciplinary practice investigates the didactic relationship between physical and mental landscapes. Working across painting, writing, video, sound, and performance, they draw connections between Eastern embodied wisdom and Western archetypal psychology, exploring both through intuitive, experiential, and cross-disciplinary forms. Their works often move fluidly between brushstrokes, words, visions, and moving images, creating immersive environments that invite intuitive and experiential forms of learning.

At the booth’s core presentation is “RAVE” (2024), a large-scale painting that encapsulates many of the artist’s core concerns and visual strategies. The work brings together their ongoing engagement with rave culture and landscape imagery, positioning the rave as both a physical environment and a metaphorical terrain through which contemporary subjectivities are formed and transformed. The painting is accompanied by “Dream Journal 01” (2026), a series of watercolour on Chinese ink paper works derived from the artist’s dream story and links with the soundtrack for meditation.

The video work “Landescape Mindscape” (2025) further expands the relationship between external environments and interior states, including Kim khan - a Paris based musicians since they collaborated together. Additional paintings, including “Shallow Shadow” (2024), “N act like I don’t kno nobody” (2024), and “Rectum” (2024), reflect their engagement with the visual languages of popular culture that is relevant in Europe.

Together, the works form a constellation of interconnected narratives in which dreams, landscapes, rituals, and popular culture become vehicles for examining how individuals navigate contemporary existence. Through a practice that is at once institutive, experimental, and cross-disciplinary, Ella Wang Olsson’s works propose a contemporary club culture and the rave as contemporary sites of ritual, collective learning, celebration, and transformation.

Ella Wang Olsson

N act like I don’ kno nobody

Ella Wang Olsson is a Chinese Swedish artist interested in the sacred, healing practices and escapism culture. Ella works in mind maps, following a non-linear intuitive flow of work that appears in the form of sound, video, painting and performance. Her practice spans from life, in the abstractions between tradition and modernity, ambience and chaos, knowing and the unknown. What is freedom? What are you escaping from? Ella offers a tangible vision of the absurdity of the world today, seeking answers by returning to ancient practices of ritual celebrations such as dance, food and prayers. But still keeping to the perspective of our saturated reality.

Selected solo exhibitions: “Landescape”, Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, China (2026); “Smoking Takes Away my Voice”, Cedar Kitchen, Shanghai, China(2025); “Shallow Shadow”, LambdaLambdaLambda Gallery, Prishtina, Kosovo(2024); “After the Orgy (Artist Talk)”, Pharmakon Gallery, Bucharest, Romania(2024); “META-TATION”, Martin Goya Business, Verre Liquide, Hangzhou, China(2023); “OPEN STUDIO” YYO Foundation, Shanghai, China(2023); “A Vlog to the Moon and Back”, Spectrum, The Greyspace, The Hague, the Netherlands (2022).

Selected group exhibitions: “Setting the Tone of the Exhibition”, Inside Out Museum, Beijing, China(2026); “Meta-tation cigarette packs”, TANK Museum, Shanghai, China(2025); “APOPHENIA”, Ritual Penang, Malaysia(2025); “Exorcise the Candy House”, Design Biennale Rotterdam, Rotterdam, the Netherlands(2025); “Aquarius Pavilion”, Brainrot Studio, Bucharest, Romania(2024); “Departure Level”, Third Street Gallery, Shanghai, China(2024); “Flower by Flowers?”, ART WHY Gallery, Shanghai, China(2023); “The Nomadic Majority”, WAS Art Center, Ningbo, China(2023); “Double Exposure”, In & Out Art Museum, Ningbo, China(2023); “Mukbang Love Story”, Rootz Film Festival, Filmhuis, The Hague, the Netherlands(2022).