- Shang Liang’s solo exhibition “Mortal at the Helm”
Mortal at the Helm
Exhibition Period: 2021.3.20-4.30
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.
- Hello，future！Where are we？
- SHANG HAI PLAZA
- Advent:Inventing landscape,Producing the earth
商亮《拳击人战舰》，装置，不锈钢、树脂，490 x 181 x 415cm，2019年
- Shang Liang’s solo exhibition “New Order”
MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present Shang Liang’s solo exhibition “New Order” opening on the 13th of July, 2019, marking the first solo show of the artist in the gallery. The exhibition will feature Shang’s recent paintings, presenting visual symbolization of characters and exploration of painting language.
Receiving the rigorous training of the Oil Painting and the Experimental Art Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Shang executed a large amount of paintings. Unlike traditional portraits, the character of the “juvenile superhuman” with mutated muscles became a specific visual symbol in her work. The exhibition will showcase the series “Good Hunter” and “Sofa Man” that the artist continuously developed over the past two years, as well as the new series “Boxing Man”: a character which gradually evolved from a figurative human body to an abstract figure with the effigy of a boxing glove, without face or organs. The “Boxing Man” is remote, it doesn’t adhere to any specific background, time or space, it emanates a certain form of power, composure and obstinacy. As a visual symbol, the strong muscles repeatedly depicted by Shang have been separated from the matrix to become a new independent species. They embody notions of heroism, physical strength, battle and conquest, and constitute a metaphor for power, loneliness and contradiction.
These mutated “Boxing Man”, exaggeratedly grown “Good Hunter” and the new series of “Couch Man” who are confined within sofas, all reflect the contradictory masculine imagination and humorous approach of these “superhumans” from the artist’s perspective. While constantly emphasizing these symbols, the artist also built her own unique visual language. The simple colors, direct and powerful image of these large-scale “boxing man”, the traces left by the repeatedly modified brushstrokes refine the contours of the subjects while evoking speed and movement, resulting in a calm yet bursting picture.
