SHANG LIANG

Shang Liang’s paintings are sometimes extracted from cinematic scenes, producing echoes and reverberations outside of the flat space of the picture plane. Sometimes based on specific characters, beginning with the “The Real Boy” series in 2012, her works are unlike traditional portraits. The muscle-mutated Superman constitutes an interesting and unique visual symbol in her works. In this exhibition, the artist presents the series of "Good Hunter" and "Sofa Man", as well as the newly expanded image of "Boxing Man": a figurative human body is gradually transformed and refined into abstraction. As a visual symbol, the strong muscles repeatedly depicted, have been separated from the parent body and become an independent new species. It is not only a heroic symbol of physical fitness, battle, and conquest, but also an ambiguous metaphor of power, loneliness, and contradiction. These evolutionary and mutated "boxers", show the artist's contradictory male imagination, build from her cultural background, and from the individual perspective of the artist.