SHANGLIANG 商 亮

Exhibition title: Shang Liang: New Man

Dates: November 7, 2022 – Febuary 12, 2023 (Tue – Sun 10:00-18:00)

Venue: Cc Foundation & Art Centre

Address: No.2, -1F Sunken Garden, Lane 9, Qufu Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai

 

Cc Foundation & Art Centre is pleased to present artist Shang Liang’s solo exhibition “New Man” on November 7, 2022, featuring her latest series of paintings and sculpture. With her signature range of visual symbols, the artist endeavors to dismantle the myths around body, gender, and subculture, and to explore alternative practices of aethestic production and identity construction.

 

In Shang’s long-time series Good Hunter, Boxing Man, and Sofa Man developed through her previous solo exhibitions “New Order” (2019) and “Mortal at the Helm” (2021), she has invented and established the image of a new race of people known for its mutated muscle, whose gender and age is vaguely discernible yet not verifiable for the viewer. It is both a symbol of heroism with its exceedingly worked out body, as well as a lonely and ambivalent individual unsanctioned by mainstream rules. Throughout Shang’s works, a muscle-worshipping aesthetic is developed to the extreme and thus becomes a parody and deconstruction of itself. By being overly strong, the new man makes strength seem suspicious and ludicrous; by being exaggeratedly in line with the mainstream discipline of the gendered body, it derails and deviates from the norms. Such an ambiguity in stance echos the fluidity of gender and identity that informs Shang’s practice.

 

The image of this “new man” can be conceived as the artist’s self reflection and projection. In the current exhibition, she and/or he will continue to chart the freedom of identity construction and self display in a postmodern, posthuman context. Entangled in a paradoxical narrative, the larger-than-life figures on canvas combine humanity, divinity, and poetry. They appear phallocentric and yet challenge the hegemony signified by their very appearance. Under Shang’s well-controlled, accurate brushstrokes telling of her orthodox training, irrationality prevails – herein lies Nietzsche’s Dionysian, Freud’s going “beyond the pleasure principle”, and, ultimately, the spiritual drive of the artist’s unceasing creation and unification with her own works.

 

 

 

 Mortal at the Helm 

Opening: 2021.3.20 16:00-19:00

Exhibition Period: 2021.3.20-4.30

Address: MadeIn Gallery, L1-03&04, One Museum Place, 388 Shan Hai Guan Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai

MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present artist Shang Liang’s solo exhibition “Mortal at the Helm”, opening on March 20th, 2021. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition in the gallery. Shang Liang’s art practices focus on the ritualized body in human life and the visual symbolization of portraiture, creating a unique visual symbol and language that are different from traditional portraits.

The artist’s solo exhibition in 2019, “New Order”, has once announced the birth of an independent species with a distinctive and strong visual image, which is not only full of heroic physical capacify, strength, and authority, but also constitutes a vague metaphor of loneliness and contradiction. While this exhibition gathers the artist’s in-depth development of the visual image in the following two years since 2019, and extends from painting to the field of sculpture.

 

Shang Liang’s creation develops from “The Real Boy” series to the later “Good Hunter”, “Sofa Man” and “Boxing Man” series. These muscular new species with labels of body and strength express mankind’s on-going demand for image-creating. This is not only a way to record, imitate, and pass on to the world, but also the power to reshape mythology and the ideal world. It is a way for “mortals” to try to grasp, influence, and control the world, but still carries blurry manipulation of the body and subtle competition against the outside world.

 

As the subject of mass fascination and consumption, the image of teenager in “Good Hunter” series possesses primitive animality and the exposed violence that hasn’t been domesticated by society. Their posture is borrowed from the ancient Egyptian and Greek statues in western sculpture and painting traditions – they are considered the idealized human bodies with divinity, endowed with eternity in body, physique and spirit. In another series “Sofa Man”, the artist uses an almost exaggerated painting technique to present an ambiguous image, where a group of human with bloated muscles are trapped in the sofa. It visually conveys a soft touch, as well as the delicate relationship between body and mind. And the “Boxing Man” series directly deprives the face and organs of human with the reconstructed unknown, and replaces the head with the image of boxing gloves. The image in the series gradually evolve and mutate in the miniature arena presented in the artist’s works, thus declaring the game order of the new world.