商徐宏
SLEEPLESS NIGHT
Solo Exhibition
October 2 to October 23, 2026
Gallery 456
456 Broadway
Soho, New York City
SLEEPLESS NIGHT is an exhibition that explores the unstable boundary between reality and dream, presence and absence, movement and confinement. Through installation, photographic fragments, painting, video, sound, and spatial intervention, Xuhong Shang creates an environment where perception is interrupted and certainty becomes fragile.
The exhibition is centered around the single-channel video Sleepless Night and expands into a physical installation composed of dark surfaces, fragmented images, linear structures, and layered visual interruptions. The exhibition suggests a space where images appear partially concealed, crossed, taped, and suspended within a field of darkness. These elements create a visual rhythm of obstruction and passage, suggesting windows, routes, barriers, memories, and psychological thresholds. The viewer is invited not only to look at the work, but to move through a condition of uncertainty.
The title SLEEPLESS NIGHT evokes a state of wakefulness between consciousness and dream. In this in-between condition, time becomes stretched, thoughts become fragmented, and ordinary images take on emotional and symbolic weight. The exhibition reflects this mental space through fractured compositions, grayscale imagery, and stark contrasts between light and shadow. The visible world appears unstable, as if caught between documentation and imagination.
The dark wall surface may be understood as a night sky, an interior void, or a psychological field. Across this darkness, white strip boards cut through the canvas images and extend outward into the surrounding space. These sharp white lines suggest lightning crossing the night, sudden flashes of thought, or cracks breaking through the surface of memory. They connect the images while also damaging and disrupting them, creating a tension between illumination and rupture. As the strips move from image to dark space, they become more than formal devices; they operate as psychological forces, exposing the instability of perception and the fragile condition of the mind during sleeplessness.
Travel, architecture, and transitional spaces emerge as recurring visual references. Airplanes, airport-like structures, passages, and abstracted silhouettes suggest movement across distance, yet this movement is never fully free. Instead, it is crossed by interruptions, invisible borders, and psychological weight. The white linear forms may be read as paths, fractures, signals, restrictions, or flashes of anxiety. They point toward direction and disorientation at the same time.
In Shang’s work, ambiguity functions as a space of possibility. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, SLEEPLESS NIGHT asks viewers to confront the uncertain nature of perception itself. The exhibition reflects on how memory, migration, globalization, and cultural experience shape the way we understand reality. It questions how images carry traces of personal and collective history, and how the intangible forces of dream, anxiety, nostalgia, and desire can become physically present within space.
The video Sleepless Night, a single-channel work with sound, becomes both an anchor and an atmosphere for the exhibition. Its duration suggests an intimate encounter with time, while its presence extends the installation into a psychological and sensory field. Sound and moving image deepen the feeling of suspended consciousness, placing the viewer within a state where the real and the imagined overlap.
Ultimately, SLEEPLESS NIGHT is an exhibition about uncertainty as a condition of contemporary life. It invites viewers into a contemplative space where images are incomplete, meanings remain open, and the familiar becomes strange. Between darkness and light, movement and stillness, dream and reality, the exhibition asks: what remains visible when certainty disappears?
SHADOW
July 28 – September 11, 2019
de Pot/寄存处
Shanghai
A solo exhibition of Xuhong Shang titled “Shadow” curated and presented by the de Pot in Shanghai from
July 28 to September 11, 2019. The cooperation between the artist and the de Pot is a cultural landscape presentation and exploration of this expression. The de Pot located at the corner of the street with a traditional vegetable market in the old French Concession of Shanghai, Middle Wulumuqi Road, used to be a gathering area of white-collar workers from various international companies and banks, which sprang up in the 1930s. This kind of mixed atmosphere within vegetable goods from the north and south of China and literati customers from the North and South of the Yangtze River continues to this day, develops into a more new and old mixture, continuously gathering artistic and cultural fashion pioneers around the world, but also to provide all sides of the old and young people to eat, drink and burn the basic life of the scarce urban center. This highly vibrant market and mixture natural continue growing, is the most direct window into the present. The de Pot is also an experimental space for art based on this.
It is mean to different from art galleries or art museums setting. Not all the visitors who attend the exhibition with expectations. There are quite a number of passers-by, who either go shopping, eating, repairing clothes, drinking coffee and other daily affairs, completely without anticipation, which creating a different experience of viewing exhibitions. The Random series oil paintings and the installation of Momentary painting and video works are disorderly in two spaces facing the market in the de Pot, challenging the normal order and viewing.
The exhibition will take every passer-by as a part of the works being created, collide these abstract emotions created in the past with each individual passing in or out of nowadays, and create every new concrete moment, which is stored in a very mixed street background. In front of the pure white wall, a more distinct image is formed. These images are constantly covered and superimposed by the stream of people and the desire for basic living needs. The contents of the original works are constantly washed away by concrete daily life. It is impossible to predict whether the works themselves will eventually fall into the eyes of the viewers or disappear. Works and viewers present a white void shrouded in a chaotic background.
Everything is uncertain, just as the artist keeps saying goodbye to his works and entering new creation while displaying his works. When you see black shadows, you know where the sun is. When you see white shadows, the sun is where you can’t be sure. It seems to be a dream that does not exist, but a reality that subverts everything all the time.
The Beauty of Visual Language as Art San Francisco Public Library Group Exhibition
August 18 to November 14, 2019
WORDS IN CHARACTERS; BOOKS AS VEHICLE
Group Exhibition Curated by Jeff Kelley
Stanford University East Asian Library
October 13, 2017 to January 5, 2018
Oklahoma State University Museum of Art
April 4, 2017 to June16, 2017
Catalogue published by the Stanford University and Oklahoma State University Museum of Art on December 2017
October 14 to November 20, 2016
ARTIST STATEMENT #1 – Group Exhibition 艺术家的宣言
CICA Museum, South Korea 韩国 CICA美术馆
Exhibition catalogue published by the CICA Press, ISBN 979-11-953952-6-2
July 2015
Sleepwalker – Xuhong Shang Solo Exhibition
梦游者 – 商徐宏個展
Shanghai Hongqiao Contemporary Art Museum
上海虹桥当代艺术馆
