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Ji Dachun's painting of a long horse presents playful enjoyment. Zou Hong/皇冠体育app Daily

Painting is painful and miserable for artist Ji Dachun.

However, he has been painting for 38 years.

In the ongoing exhibition Without a Home at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, the 45-year-old artist is displaying more than 40 works from the past decade, spanning several key moments of his career. The exhibition also marks the artist's first institutional exhibition in , reviewing his most comprehensive works to date.

Best-known for his Surrealist, satirical critiques of contemporary Chinese society, Ji is often juggling between traditional Chinese forms and the post-modern art construction of the West.

"When I face a long-established art style, such as traditional Chinese ink painting, I feel confused because it's hard to maintain the core while adding my own interpretation. So I just do some experiments by painting what I like without many rules," says Ji.

The testing period gave birth to some humorous images, such as a long horse and an ostrich putting a sock on its head, which gave the public an impression of Ji as a "playful artist".

Seeing his works at the exhibition, one could easily be confused since some of them are Abstract and in black-and-white, such as Plastic Brain Fluid, which evokes both Chinese landscape painting and Western abstraction, while some are colorful and tell a story, such as his painting Romeo and Zhu Yingtai, which has two tragic figures of classical literature from two different countries.