Los Angeles–based artist Michelle Blade will present her solo exhibition The River, curated by Michael Slenske, at Powerlong Museum in Shanghai, on view from November 16, 2025, to January 25, 2026. Organized in collaboration with Asia Art Center, which represents the artist, the exhibition follows her previous solo shows Maker of Meaning (Taipei, 2023) and Grace Electric (Beijing, 2024).
Rivers don't just move water, they carry memory. They etch identity and meaning into every stone lodged in their beds, every muscle used to traverse them. As tomes of ancient civilizations, rivers aren't just geographic, they're scenographic. A river, be it raging or trickling, is a living, breathing sculpture. It's a liquid archive, a continual work-in-progress whose entire mise en scène reshapes with every bend. In Taoist philosophy, the Dao itself is riverine, or maybe just a stand-in for a Blade-like swimmer: humbled, observant, flowing with (never against) the current. That notion of flow forms not just the conceptual spine of The River, but the throughline of the artist's entire practice: a Californicated blend of Romanticism, Magical Realism, and personal mythmaking via deft and delicate mark-making.
Born in Glendale, a bedroom community northeast of downtown L.A., Blade had a solitary childhood, often lost between the city's car culture and its canyon wilderness. Her father owned McDonald's franchises and worked constantly, and Blade turned inward, drawing flora, fauna, and fragments of imagined worlds. That sparked a lifelong fascination with landscape and the frisson between the natural and built environments that define Southern California.
Pursuing a landscape that is in constant flux, Blade returns again and again to the same landscapes and domestic scenes. Viewed together, as in The River, the effect is cumulative. The exhibition galleries at Powerlong Museum are arranged in a continuum of tones and seasons: family portraits, narrative vignettes, works on paper and ceramics, grand landscapes, and scenes from her neighborhood, both before and after the Eaton Fire. "This year has been a lot. I don't know if I've made sense of it all yet," Blade says. "But I think, while working on this exhibition, I've been trying to hold onto a fast-paced time of change while attempting to honor the last four years and what I've experienced as a human, a mom, a community member, and as an artist."
The River, like all rivers, is a meditative space, reflecting on memory, creating beauty through energy, and, sometimes, destruction, while the flow, always moving, finds its way home.
Powerlong Museum, located in Shanghai's Minhang District, opened in 2017. The museum spans over 23,000 square meters and houses nine exhibition halls. The River will be presented in the museum's grand exhibition hall, which comprises five adjoining rooms that together form an expansive, multi-layered space ideal for Blade's exploration of flow, time, and transformation. Over the years, Powerlong Museum has staged major international exhibitions, showcasing leading artists such as Sanyu, Wang Yuping, and Ni Youyu, alongside global masters from the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum Collection, including Anthony van Dyck, Francisco Goya, Jean-François Millet, Gustav Klimt, René Magritte, Marc Chagall, and Andy Warhol.
Michelle Blade: The River
Curated by Michael Slenske
Dates | 2025.11.16 - 2026.1.25
Venue | Hall 3, Shanghai Powerlong Museum, China
Organized by POWERLONG MUSEUM
Supported by ASIA ART CENTER
Sponsored by NIPPON PAINT
