The Weight Of Love Varad Bang

For his solo debut in India titled The Weight of Love, Varad Bang pays homage to Wong Kar Wai’s cinematic masterpiece In The Mood for Love (2000); a film that explores the complexity of heartbreak and betrayal set against the backdrop of 1960s Hong Kong.

It’s both the universal and personal resonance of unresolved love that led to Bang’s homage. The film’s languid storytelling, dramatic composition and vivid cinematography has long fascinated creatives. Its painterly quality (chiaroscuro-esque in certain scenes) emphasises space, light, colour and composition creating a deeply immersive world.

For the Pune-based, Florence-trained artist, this tribute is a way of capturing the quiet ache of love, heartbreak and longing. He channels the film’s raw emotional landscape and language into atmospheric canvases that evoke restlessness, tension and beauty.

In Bang’s reflections, the weight of love is just as compelling as its lightness. But as an artist how do you create while also re-creating? It’s in this grey area that Bang looks to bridge academic training and a growing interest in impressionistic storytelling. He references Vermeer’s controlled light and quiet narratives (Bang finds a parallel with both the artist and the filmmaker’s proclivity for hidden meanings) and employs a more intentional use of brushwork and layering of oil on linen. 

Each scene is chosen by the artist to create a space where art and emotion come together; the audience simultaneously experiencing the stillness and the violent turbulence of love. Bang looks to blur the lines between the viewer and the protagonists. In some vignettes, the viewer is allowed (even welcome) to step into the moment and the feeling; while in others the protagonists’ faces are revealed, creating a distance. Recurring background elements and motifs heighten these reflections so that viewers are immersed in both their memories as well as the scene in situ.  

Through this series, the artist aims for the audience to feel a similar sense of drifting solitude; to find in the chaos of love, a place of comfort. Bang wishes to awaken a memory of the past and takes the viewer through simple, unnoticed moments where thoughts are consumed by the presence of someone else. This push and pull between immersion and separation mirrors how we experience memories, love, and longing.

This showcase is a deep meditation on the idea of love. Through the works, Bang explores how love unfolds in passing spaces—in bars, streets, late-night conversations, and in the digital world. The latter, resulting in an instantaneous building of a connection between two individuals, and then dissolving almost as quickly. The fragility of modern day relationships is heightened by the order of the paintings in the show, each work becoming progressively quieter and more introspective. 

At the heart of the show (both literally and figuratively) is Whispers of the Hidden, in which on first glance, we see a couple walking, but through a play of light and composition, Bang, choses to focus on their shadows. Silent figures. Ephemeral. Fleeting. 

With this exhibition, Bang continues to build on the tension between passion and restraint, love and loss, connection and solitude, intimacy and distance, the personal and the universal. 


Words Priyanka Khanna
Date 14.04.2025