Varad Bang is in the mood for heartbreak

If your idea of romance involves unresolved tension, beautiful lighting, and one perfectly choreographed tear rolling down a cheek, Varad Bang gets it. His debut solo exhibition, The Weight of Love, showing at Pristine Contemporary in Delhi, is a slow-burning, nostalgia-drenched, oil-on-linen love letter to Wong Kar-wai’s iconic film, In the Mood for Love. And also, possibly, to your ex.

At just 25, this artist has taken the heartbreak he once lived through and the movie that mirrored it and turned them into a series of paintings so intimate, they feel like reading someone’s private WhatsApp chats in gallery lighting.

Raised by two dentists in Aurangabad, Bang’s relationship with painting began early, thanks to his mom, who enrolled him in after-school art class to keep him busy. After a stint in architecture school (which he describes as “too structured”), he pulled a fast one on his family and secretly built an art portfolio during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the rest of us were busy baking banana bread and doomscrolling, he was applying to The Florence Academy of Art—and figuring a way to get in.

While architecture taught Bang structure (and how to draw very straight lines on very little sleep), it was Florence that taught him patience. Real patience. The kind that comes from spending two entire years working only with charcoal—no colours, no oils, no shortcuts. “My life was black and white,” he says, not even pretending to be dramatic.

Before his third year in Florence, Bang hadn’t touched oil paints. He was more of a “Marvel characters and Sydney Sweeney sketches for fun” kind of guy—the kind of portfolio that lives and dies on Instagram likes. So, going from that to spending months quietly observing how light bounces off a piece of fruit? A pretty dramatic pivot. Somewhere in his third year, while working on a self-portrait (and possibly questioning every life choice), something shifted. “I stopped waiting for teachers to tell me what to do. I started trusting myself.” Which, frankly, is also what every therapist will tell you after a breakup.

The idea for The Weight of Love didn’t begin in a studio—it began on a couch in Florence. “I think I watched the movie thanks to my European friends,” Bang says. “We used to have these movie nights on weekends—just watching, talking, discussing films. That’s when I first saw In the Mood for Love, and it just stuck with me. Each scene felt like a painting, like a moving painting. The longing, the solitude—I had been through heartbreak myself back in college in Ahmedabad, so it hit hard. I remember thinking: I’d love to paint this movie someday.” And he did.

If you’ve seen the film, you know it’s a masterclass in sexual tension, cigarette smoking, and unspoken feelings. Two neighbours, both married to other people, slowly fall into something between love and regret. No big declarations. No dramatic finales. Just longing portrayed beautifully—cinematically lit and exquisitely dressed. Bang saw himself in it. So, naturally, he painted it. Not just scenes from the film, but also the emotions in between the frames. It’s no surprise the film remains a Gen Z fixation—In the Mood for Love is basically the blueprint for the modern-day situationship. All the yearning, none of the closure. It’s mutual emotional damage styled for the Instagram generation—silk cheongsams, haunting music, and heartbreak bathed in the right amount of mood lighting.

Over the course of a year and a half, Bang created 18 deeply atmospheric oil paintings. “I wanted people to feel like they’re stepping into a memory,” he says. Mission accomplished then. Take ‘But Then It Passed On, As All Things Do’, a nod to the film’s deleted kiss scene, tender and charged, where love, guilt, and timing collide. The artist paints not the passion but the emotional wreckage left behind. And then there’s ‘Whispers of the Hidden’, where instead of focusing on faces, Bang paints the shadows of the characters. It recalls the film’s motif of anonymity. How the affair is never fully named, and emotions are always half-lit, half-said. By showing only the shadows, he doubles down on that sense of secrecy, of the one that got away, and that almost-relationship that never had the space to be anything more.

His personal favourite? ‘What The World Sees’, a quiet moment of the male protagonist tuning a musical instrument, body present, mind somewhere else. “There are certain moments that go noticed, and while you feel like you know the person like the person is physically present with you, his mind is somewhere else and in that certain split second the guy is completely in two different worlds physically and mentally. Those are the things which [tend to] grab my attention.” You’ll also notice red. A lot of it. A nod to the Hong Kong-based filmmaker’s palette, but also a symbolic thread: red as love, red as danger, red as desire you’re not supposed to act on.

Curated by Arjun Sawhney and Arjun Butani of Pristine Contemporary, The Weight of Love is brought to life by veteran designer Sumant Jayakrishnan. A master of multidisciplinary design, Jayakrishnan has worked with everyone from Tim Supple to Deepa Mehta and is known for turning spaces into emotional landscapes. So, what drew him to a debut Gen Z painter’s first show? “I think the quality of the paintings, because they were so evocative,” says Jayakrishnan, who has transformed the gallery into a moody, immersive 1960s Hong Kong world, where the emotional tension of the paintings bleeds into the architecture itself. Think old radios, textured wallpaper, vintage lamps. You don’t just view the art—you walk into it.

The paintings themselves aren’t arranged at random. There’s a build-up. You begin outside, brushing past the threshold of domestic life—staircases, corridors, the quiet spaces where encounters linger. As you move inward, the paintings become more intimate. Eventually, you land in rooms where silence is louder than speech.

Bang’s work arrives at a time when the internet is obsessively looping back to all things Y2K—flip phones, blurry flash photos, and yes, Wong Kar-wai’s cinematic heartbreaks. TikTok is full of people trying to recreate In the Mood for Love aesthetics with moody filters, red lighting, and rain-drenched gazes that say “I’m fine” when they’re clearly not. But while everyone’s busy slapping a Ghibli or grainy AI filter on their lives, Bang’s over here, layering oil on linen, one week at a time. “I think those filters and aesthetics are like fashion trends,” he says. “They stay for a week, maybe a month, and then they disappear. But paintings? Paintings stay with you.”

The Weight of Love is about what happens when you sit with the stuff most people run from: heartbreak, loneliness, longing. It’s about catching the precise moment someone looks away, or almost says something—and how those tiny pauses hold entire stories. If you’ve ever loved and lost or just had a crush that lingered longer than it should have, Bang’s work will meet you exactly where you are. Preferably under soft lighting, in a room that smells faintly of turpentine and old secrets.

The Weight of Love will be on display between April 16 and May 11 at Gallery Pristine Contemporary in Delhi. For more details, visit gallerypristine.com