SHANGHAI.- START Museum will present Polish artist Karolina Jabłońska’s first museum solo exhibition in Asia, titled Which Way the Wind is Blowing, opening to the public on August 22. This exhibition marks the 19th case study of the museum’s ongoing “Genealogy Study of Artists” project, initiated in 2018. The exhibition features a series of new works created specifically in response to START Museum’s architectural space and the natural-cultural context of the Huangpu River.

This innovative project establishes a continuous academic research platform focused on the interplay between an artist’s personal genealogy and their artistic creation, utilizing exhibitions, publications, sound documentation, visual materials, and historical literature to systematically explore the artist evolution of the featured artist.

Karolina Jabłońska stands as one of the most compelling artists of the rising generation in Poland today. Working primarily in painting, her art masterfully blends the medium's inherent two-dimensionality with a powerful sense of three-dimensional spatial control. In recent years, grounding her practice in ontology and autobiographical exploration, the artist has forged new visual perspectives and artistic expressions, engaging critically with themes of gender, politics, art history, and social reality.

For her first exhibition in China, Which Way the Wind is Blowing, Jabłońska worked with the specifics of the Start Museum’s space and surroundings in mind, considering the spacious interior filled with natural lights, shadows and reflections, and the proximity to the river. Her figures become fluid with the wet, cloudy environments around them, displacing the "self" from portraiture into landscapes: In Flying sketches (2025), the trembling wind swept up a flurry of close-up sketches of self-portrait, quivering through the air. In The letter from the fortune-teller (2025), the “I” in the fortune-teller’s eyes is blurred beyond recognition by the falling rain. In Raindrops (2025), her iconic portrait forms only emerge through the distortion of falling water-drops. Fragmented clues compel the audience to reconstruct and imagine the individual and the truth.