ANOTHER WORLD: Christopher Cook | Wenhui Hao | Qian Qian | Mircea Teleagǎ

Frestonian Gallery is delighted to present four artists showing for the first time, whose works span a wide range of materials and techniques, brought together here by their shared fascination in constructing surreal and beguiling landscapes and narratives. 

 

The recent series of works by Christopher Cook on display draws heavy influence from the Perisan miniature tradition, which has been of particular interest to Cook for its synthesis of eastern and western / late-renaissance traditions. The works, rendered in gently glittering graphite, employ mostly eastern compositional elements, as the various narrative components are ‘stacked’ within the middle ground, with their positions in the picture plane – rather than their scale – denoting relative distance. The various animals, human figures and natural forms all bring symbolic charge to the tableau, from the timeless (the monastic form in Storm Guru and the hooded bird of prey in Heart) to the contemporary (the razor wire in Promised Lands), underlining the uneasy and fragile meeting of two artistic and historic ideologies. 

 

For Wenhui Hao the landscape of painting is invariably a stage set for the presence of the naked human form. In Meet Me In The Pale Late Spring a female form lays in repose in a hallucinatory and ethereal forest clearing, whilst two figures are intertwined before a red waterfall in On The Night I Fled in Panic. The figures in Hao’s works emerge and submerge within a broader abstract language of intuitive and highly physical painting – a practice that is is fuelled and defined by Hao’s skilful balance of passion and control. 

 

The control and mastery of medium is immediately apparent in the extraordinary watercolours of Qian Qian. Her series of ‘fallen angel’ paintings took initial inspiration from the William Blake painting The Ancient of Days, and expands on the notion of heaven and earth converging through surreal and complex allegorical figure studies. The ‘angels’ become increasingly deconstructed – as in The Maze – where the body itself has dissolved into a few core components, held together by swirling energy, as the remanants of the man-made (the golden chain and shackles) fractures amid the chaos. 

 

If Qian Qian’s paintings are redolent of the heavens, the works presented by Mircea Teleagǎ bring to mind the earthly shrine. Everyday, incidental objects are elevated to the status of central figures, and are surrounded by improbable and impossible compositions. In Time Trap wild flowers and grasses sprout from the foreground of an interior domestic scene; in Angel a child’s toy towers over a landscape composed of palm trees and stacked air-con units. Teleaga writes of his paintings, in a sentiment that could be said to be the unifying factor of all the extraordinary painters in this exhibition: “The works have their own running of events, unrelated to our own”. 

 

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Christopher Cook (b. 1959, UK) studied at the Rietveld Akademie, Amsterdam and the Royal College of Art, receiving his MA in Painting in 1986. He lives and works in Devon, UK. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Camden Art Centre, London; Haugesund Kunstforening, Norway; Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany; Stedelijk Museum Breda, Netherlands; Today Art Museum, China; Museum of Art at University of Memphis; and Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan. His works are in prominent public collections, including Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College; The British Museum, London; Cleveland Museum of Art; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. In 2017, he received the Valeria Sykes Award. From 2022-23 Cook was Visiting Professor to NTNU Taipei, and also lectured in several other universities in Taiwan. A solo show of work he produced there was held at Chini Gallery, Taipei in 2024. In 2025-6 he was selected for the John Moores Prize and exhibited at Mary Ryan Gallery, New York 

 

Wenhui Hao (b.2000, China) Graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2024 with an MA in Painting, and completed her BA in painting at Capital Normal University, Beijing, in 2023. She lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions include; ‘By the Rivers Dark’, Half Gallery, New York, US (2025). Group exhibitions include; ‘Birth of the Between’, Latitude Gallery, New York, US (2025); ‘The Torrent & The Fold’, LBF Contemporary, London (2025); ‘Birds of a Feather’, Chili Art Projects, London (2025); ‘Hinterland’, Shipton Gallery, London (2025); ‘Luck is not chance’, Haricot Gallery, London (2025); ‘Not a Figure in Sight’, Half Gallery, New York, US (2025). Art fairs include; Untitled Art, Half Gallery, Houston, US (2025); Artefiera, L.U.P.O. Lorenzelli Projects, Bologna, Italy (2025); Untitled Art, Latitude Gallery, Miami Beach, US (2024); Art 021, Seefood Room Gallery, Hong Kong (2024). Her works are included in the J.P. Morgan Chase Art Collection and France's Christian Levett's FAMM Museum (Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins). 

 

Qian Qian (b. 1990, China) received her MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2018. She currently lives and works in Buckie, Scotland, where the coastal and rural landscape informs the evolving framework of her practice. Selected exhibitions include the two-person exhibition The Light Burns the Reality, Sixi Museum (2025); the solo exhibition Portals to the Past, Lychee One, London (2024); Into the Woods, Make Room, Los Angeles (2025); La Mariposa, Soho Revue, London (2025); Supercommunity, Tank Shanghai (2024); Disembodied, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); X Museum Triennial, Beijing (2023); Mother Art Prize, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2023); and Syncopes, Mimosa House, London (2021). She is the recipient of the Mother Art Prize Online Award (2023) and the Eaton Fund (2026), and received an Arts Council England DYCP Grant (2023). She was also shortlisted for FBA Futures (2019). 

 

Mircea Teleagă (b. 1989, Romania) received his MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in 2016. He lives and works in London. Selected solo exhibitions include Paradise (2025) LBF Contemporary, London; The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (2024) Theo Gallery, Seoul; Locus Solus (2023) Unit 1 Gallery Workshop, London and Presence (2018) Sarabande Foudnation, London. His works have been included in group exhibitions including Domestic Flights (2025) Frestonian Gallery, London; Hinterland (2023) John Martin Gallery, London; In Conversation (2021), bo.lee Gallery, London and Romanian Eyes (2018) Space K, Seoul. His work can be found in collections worldwide amongst which the Kolon Collection, Seoul; AVA Collection, HKBU, Hong Kong; KHNP Collection, Gyeongju; Sarabande Collection, London; Simons & Simmons, London and Soho House Collection Amsterdam and Paris. He has been awarded the Sarabande Award 2014-2016 by Dinos Chapman and received the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2025.