In 1993 Xuhong Shang began his Mountain Series, a body of work in which self-imposed parameters would be strictly observed and a carefully controlled number of variables would be successively introduced. The black-and-white palette is perhaps the most obvious constant that Shang adopted, but the narrowly rectangular format of his canvases has been an equally distinguishing characteristic of these works. Sometimes vertically and sometimes horizontally aligned, the shape of the canvas makes subtle reference to traditional Chinese scroll paintings, a ramification that is particularly relevant to the representational imagery that Shang incorporates into his compositions. Appropriating the style of classical Chinese landscapes, he renders it as a ghostly inversion, like a photographic negative in which black replaces white as a ground for faint intimations of the misty crags, gnarled trees and meandering rivers of literati painting. To heighten the intangibility of this abstract imagery, Shang paints his grounds in a combination of wax and a black duflat pigment that approximates the capacity of velvet to absorb rather than reflect light. The effect is a visual lushness, an illusionistic textural opulence that Shang cultivates as part of a strategy to seduce the viewer into involvement with the conceptual content.

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