Exhibitions

‘Ever Young’ by Shen Liang – Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok

Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok

Dec 23, 2021 - Jan 30, 2022

^{All images courtesy of Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok}

Tang Contemporary Art is proud to announce the opening of "Ever Young," the latest solo exhibition by Chinese artist Shen Liang, curated by Dai Zhuoqun, at Tang Contemporary Art’s Bangkok space. The exhibition, held from 23 December 2021 to 30 January 2022, will showcase varieties of the artist's works. Through paintings and sculptures which use a variety of tools and mediums to create a complex and unexpected effect. 

The heartbeat plant is an herb of immortality that can make a person young again, which appears in the ancient Babylonian tale The Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was a young king who ruled during the First Dynasty (ca. 2900-2800 BCE) in Uruk, an ancient Sumerian city-state. “Gilgamesh” is the written Akkadian form that comes from the Sumerian “Bilgames,” which means “an old man becoming a young man.”

When I read the story of Gilgamesh and the heartbeat plant, I thought of Shen Liang. Those three words—heart, beat, and plant—are appropriate ways to describe my impressions of his recent work. Shen Liang says that he is a classic Pisces, with two different temperaments, verging on different personalities. One is peaceful and steady, and the other is often excitable and enjoys funny, sarcastic accidents. Sometimes, something funny will excite him and transform him into a young man again.

Shen Liang’s work has evolved across three distinct stages, from his early nostalgic paintings done in thick oils, which later developed into his Trivialities series in brush, acrylic, and charcoal powder on wrapping paper. His most recent evolution is an extension of his This is a Book series: Night Shift, Streetwalker, and other small paintings on paper and his Birding Project series of superlight clay sculptures. In this new phase, Shen boldly uses brushes, acrylic paints, gel pens, paint markers, ballpoint pens, highlighters, and a combination of many tools and mediums to create a complex and uncontrollable effect. The influence that switching between tools can have on the final result is often easy to overlook.

Shen Liang’s early thicker oil paintings imbue two-dimensional images with more materiality, transforming painting into an object and not just an image. The acrylic and charcoal powder on paper almost feels like an abstract assignment, rescuing painting from a preoccupation with subject matter. The painter no longer has to consider what to paint. He can paint anything he wants because he is no longer limited to specific subject matter. Or, more accurately, even though the image is built on something concrete, its essence is abstract.

Fun is the through line in Shen’s work. In his early nostalgic doodles and traditional opera characters, he usually depicted his subjects as flickering memories, restoring abundance and energy through amusing scrawls on these classic images. Later, he placed sarcasm into his paper-based series Night Shift, Streetwalker, Amour, and Love Across the Mountains and Seas, which developed from This is a Book. A series of humorous points that blow hot and cold occasionally veer into biting satire. Birding Project is a series of direct superlight clay sculptures, to which he has added hair. He made more than 800 of these somewhat erotic sculptures, which is just the right number.

Shen Liang has said that only he knows whether he is happy or not. His recent small-scale paintings on paper closely adhere to his personal emotions and tastes. They are sometimes exciting, full of chance elements. Some are good and some are bad, but all abound in uncertainty and release the utmost joy. Streetwalker, the earliest of these series painted in Japan in 2018, attempts to combine painterly qualities with the clean, simple images of Japanese animation. Here, images taken from the internet, Douyin, and Japanese TV dramas that do not depict real streets have been adapted or reimagined through the artist’s eyes.

About the Artist

Shen Liang （Born in 1978, Liaoning Province, China.）
He graduated with a Master of Fine Art Degree (MFA) from Central Academy of Fine Art, China in 2003. He currently lives and works in the Department of Art & Design, Beijing University of Technology.

His selected and recent solo exhibitions include: “Ever Young” Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok, Bangkok, Thailand 2021; “Monoloque”, Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand, 2013; “Outside/Inside”, Tong Space, Beijing, China, 2013; “Against Space–Eight Kinds of Attitude and Situation About Painting”, China Space, Beijing, 2012; “The History Lesson”, Pekin Fine Arts, Beijing, China, 2010.