Shao Wenhuan

Wings of a Phoenix Bird, No. 2
Two Pieces

142 x 160 cm

2016 - 2018

Mixed Media
(Photography, gel silver emulsion painting, 
aluminium slices, oil paint on linen)

Hidden Tracks

90 x 100 cm

2017 - 2018

Mixed Media 
(Photography, gel silver emulsion painting, 
aluminium wire)

Wings of a Phoenix Bird, No. 1
Two Pieces

197 x 191 cm

2016 - 2018

Mixed Media
(Photography, gel silver emulsion painting,
aluminium slices, oil paint on linen)

                       Perspectives in the Distance

Combinations of photography and painting, Shao's works are dark and kaleidoscopic puzzles of nature that surge with allusions to art history and the subjectivity of space.

It is easy to get absorbed into the worlds of Shao’s images. Photography is very much at the center, but he manages to conjure destabilized realities and alternate existences all the same. Stars, lakes, stones, the moon – these become hallucinatory landscapes of alienation, the universe turned inside-out. He turns away from the idea of a “correct” or definitive experience and blurs binaries: truth and fiction, existence and emptiness, certainty and the unknown.

In “Perspectives in the Distance”, a large number of pieces meditate on forests and mountains encountered in Shao’s travels to the Yellow Mountains and Mount Fuchun (close to Hangzhou and famously depicted by the 14^th century painter Huang Gongwang). Together, they constitute a metaphor with the trees as humans, the forests and mountains as society, and their disorder as a parallel to our own. Under the vast starry sky, we may believe we exist in an orderly universe, but its origin is fated to remain unknown.

While intervening in this debate about a true order, Shao also stresses the role of a sense of space in any such dispute. In works like Wings of a Phoenix Bird, the multidimensional rips of aluminum showcase Shao’s break from a single, black-and-white, subjective or objective worldview in his photography. It is not necessarily a rethinking of image consciousness (that is, the way the image acts as a mirror) he strives for, but this rethinking of space.

Photographers often see the world with the camera by moving far and near, by which they share their own sense of seeing. They perceive the distance in forests, society and the universe as a kind of self-organizing order, so as to find the value of their own existence. This exhibition by Shao Wenhuan is about his gaze from afar, and the uncertain dream that stares back at him.