“Fictions in Fragments,” the latest show by Fu Site at Kylin Gallery in Beverly Hills, is an adventure not to be missed. Mixing ghostly characters and cracking lightning with influences stretching from modern architecture to baroque drama, Fu’s paintings alternately look like haunted mansions and dreamlike lands.

The first painting you encounter is an excellent introduction to Fu’s style, Daydreamer (2018) which features a man in formal attire, back turned to the viewer, as a cloud of blue-gray smoke drifts from his mouth. The figure seems just barely lifted out from the gray fog which dominates the piece, barely visible, yet it is the singular focus. With the slightest tilt of the head, Fu injects a deep sense of contemplation.

From his time at Tsinghua University in Beijing—one of the most prestigious art schools in Asia—Fu has a considerable capability for portraiture and figuration. This skill shines in the impressionistic figures, where Fu is able to again convey strong emotion through these misty, ethereal characters. Strangers (2016), with the trio of temporally displaced characters in a modern mansion, oozes tension. Three figures, all turned away from one another, feature in the painting which straddles contemporary and classic, indoors and outdoors, reality and memory. They exist together in this space, yet seem estranged from one another, caught up in their own individual neurotic mysteries.

Fu Site, Daydreamer (2016). Courtesy Kylin Gallery

This tension is a theme throughout many of the paintings, including the ominous Landscape with two gentlemen (2015). In a thick swamp of muted tan and green reeds, two spectral men wrestle one another as they look off into the horizon. Here again, their faces are hidden from us, and we are left to guess what happened to bring us to this point in the misty marshlands. There is a downward arrow pointing at nothing in particular—or something critically important.

Earlier works are featured in the back room, but as Fu’s style developed, his need for a firm reality lessened, culminating finally in The revelation of violence (2018). This work is a complete departure from baroque mansions, translucent specters and men in fields. It shows two Greco-Roman gods fighting one another in a Surrealistic expanse, accented by lakes of color. Some grid lines—vestiges from the earlier emphasis on architecture—create a strong sense of depth, as if we are watching from atop Mount Olympus.

“Fictions in Fragments” is a dazzling display of mystery and magic, and Fu Site’s talent and creative ability is truly not to be missed in a rare showing on the West Coast.