POWER STRUCTURES 

D Contemporary is proud to present Power Structures, a compelling group exhibition featuring works by four promising emerging artists: Ben Tong, Dingyue Luna Fan, Marius Seidlitz, and Santara Pawar.

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Power is omnipresent—it shapes our movements, interactions, and perceptions of both ourselves and others. It is embedded within systems, institutions, and architectures, structuring the very fabric of our societies. Power Structures brings together a diverse group of artists who interrogate, deconstruct, and reimagine the ways in which power manifests—whether aesthetically, politically, socially, or personally.

Through painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, the works in this exhibition expose both the visible and invisible frameworks that define authority, control, and resistance. By critically engaging with historical power structures, these artists propose alternative narratives that transcend dominance and hierarchy—dismantling illusions of boundaries to create new worlds and inspire connection.

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Exploring how form, colour, and gesture can embody resistance, fluidity, and transformation, the artists challenge traditional representation, allowing space for ambiguity and open interpretation. The dynamic interplay of layered textures, fragmented compositions, and bold palettes reflects both the instability and potential within power dynamics. Some pieces evoke the weight of oppression through dense, constrained forms, while others suggest liberation—offering an emotional and intuitive counterpoint to the status quo. These works remind us that power is not only something observed or described; it is also felt, sensed, and experienced on a visceral level, embedded within the complex structures of the natural world.

Power Structures invites audiences to reconsider the forces that shape our realities and to envision new possibilities beyond existing constraints.

 

Ben Tong

Ben Tong (b. 2000) is a British-born artist, based in London, with Hong Kong roots. A graduate of Central Saint Martins, he is currently pursuing an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. His work explores the concept of the Grotesque Sublime. A duality that contrasts and connects the divine imagery and out-of-body experiences of the Sublime with the unsettling and horrific elements of the Grotesque. This interplay creates tension between beauty and discomfort, drawing the viewer into his layered, multi-sensory narratives. Tong examines themes of space, religion, war, nature, folklore, and horror through a multi-faceted approach. He plays with the contrasts of transcendence and immanence, crafting work that feels simultaneously otherworldly and grounded in visceral, material realities.

 

Dingyue Luna Fan

Dingyue (Luna) Fan, (b.1994 Chongqing, China), obtained her BA in French in 2016 before relocating to Montreal, Canada. In 2023, she graduated from the Royal College of Art and is currently based in London. With a multidisciplinary background, her practice includes painting, photography, and light-sensitive materials, focusing on feminism through the subconscious mind of creatures, and the fragments of childhood, which capture the fluidity of memory, sign and imagination while also exploring the fragility and tension of emotions and vitality in the reconstructed dreamscape.

 

Santara Pawar

Santara Pawar is an artist living and working in London currently studying at Royal College of Arts. Her work explores the intersection between internal sensation and the tangible world. Primarily working with oil paint on large canvas, she also engages with sculptural matter to create physical manifestations of her inner experiences. Santara’s work is developed through consciously enclosing herself in a dreamlike state of making. Pawar invites a direct sensory response from the viewer, engaging the nervous system rather than relying on narrative, igniting a more sensual and visceral element of the brain. Santara Pawar does not provide a literal representation of the natural world; instead, she evokes its internal, lived experience through mark, colour, and light, creating residues of sensation and presence.

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“The work is of sensitivity and fragility; when even a spring rain can be too much to handle, I can harbour myself in a constructed environment within the mind. Painting enables me to do that.”

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Marius Seidlitz

Marius Seidlitz (b. 1985) is an artist and engraver based in Chemnitz, Germany. He studied Fine Arts at Bauhaus University in Weimar and trained as an engraver at the National Engraving School in Suhl, earning his journeyman’s degree in 2008, along with state and federal recognition in his trade. In 2010, he was awarded a grant through the Federal Ministry of Research and Education’s funding program. He has been working as a self-employed artist since that time and further enhanced his skills by completing a course in Craft Industry Design in Weimar in 2012. Seidlitz’s works are held in private collections in Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Turkey, China, Denmark, France, Austria, Norway, the USA, Australia, and Japan.

Seidlitz's artistic practice is formally shaped in many ways: skill as an engraving master as well as from the precise approach of design and free creative use of oil paint. His expressive images often spring from a diverse range of bodies that are deliberately imperfect. The viewer sees colourful curves, multi- layered nudity in all the garish contradictions – between attraction and repulsion, but always multidimensional, always dynamic and never too accurate. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ Entangled bodies, hinted limbs and lips sink into colour- intensive surfaces and dynamic lines. With acrylic paint and oil paints, Seidlitz puts the self, and how it presents itself, to the test. His bodies can only be naked, because the soul shows itself when it is naked. Human beings are complex and simple at the same time, they are always in the process of becoming.