Talisman takes its title from the magical object in Honoré de Balzac’s eponymous allegory of desire and decay—later echoed in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—to reconsider painting’s enchantment, vitality, and latent threat amid disillusionment and excess.

At the heart of the exhibition is the paradox of “enchantment”, at a split between market consumption and artistic devotion. Talisman begins with a fascination for the mythic, symbolic forms circulating in contemporary painting. What does this shared yearning for myth, reification, and the applied surface reveal about our present psychic and cultural condition?

The exhibition’s title establishes a mimetic and conceptual framework—drawing on literary, art-historical, and philosophical lineages—to examine the source and technology of enchantment in the work of art today. To what extent does enchantment rely on repetition, citation, or decontextualization? Are we operating on shrinking terrain, or is there more in the passage from the talisman to the talismanic?

Artists working across multiple registers reverberate throughout the exhibition, moving between the real and the symbolic, the objectual and the residual. The earliest work in the show, a painting from Ker-Xavier Roussel’s Pastorals series, marks a lingering, talismanic charge under the confluence of Modernism, Japanism and decorative art at the turn of the 20th century. In their separate notes, the participating artists unfold corroborations, deviations, and recalibrations of the talismanic, forming an illustrious map of enchantment in the face of decay and renewal.

Text by Hindley Wang.