Xuhong Shang’s art operates between cultures, or between realities – for reality is defined, more than we realize, by the culture in which we live. 

Shang’s Mountains series of paintings juxtaposes versions of Chinese landscapes (but they might also be enormously enlarged details of Renaissance landscapes) with contemporary abstraction.  This is our first cue that things in this artist’s world are seldom as they seem; yet he poses not the old philosophical question of appearance and reality, but the assertion that appearance is reality.  (This is a subtle variation on Kenneth Burke’s dictum to his literary students, “Be careful how you think about the world; it is like that.”)

I spent my childhood and adolescence in the era of the Cultural Revolution, in which life was dull and monotonous. Art was an outlet for my disappointment with real life. Reading fiction and poetry, both Chinese and foreign, were the only amusements in my childhood, and I indulged in my imagination. I have been pursuing art ever since I started learning to draw when I was ten years old.

Through stark tonal contrasts and the play of crisp non-objective forms against faintly discernible abstract imagery, the Mountain series of paintings of Chinese-American artist Shang Xuhong reflects metaphorically on the distinct but complementary distortions that reason and imagination impose upon perception. For Shang the task of making a painting is consonant with the activity of balancing the pressures of logic, derived from a systematic analysis of past experience, with the infinite freedom of the mind to invent impossible scenarios every time we confront the problem of objectivity. Where does truth lie? For Shang, the question always involves a dialectical response.

Since the early days of modernism, when painters began seeking convenient devices for suggesting the conceptual import of their representations, the tendentious restriction of compositions to black and white has been an acknowledged sign of the desire to convert painting into a process of rigorously controlled analysis.  Elimination of the vagaries of colour not only reduces the range of variables for which the painter much account, but, more importantly, it detaches the composition definitively from the outside world. 

In 1986, a young art professor walked into a lecture hall in Shanghai to hear the English painter David Hockney deliver a talk about his work.  An international art star at the height of his fame, Hockney peppered his remarks with art world gossip and personal anecdotes, starting most of his sentences with the first person singular pronoun.  The young professor had never heard anyone, artist or otherwise, speak of his or her work on such individualistic terms. 

High in the stratosphere – gliding above an expanse of billowy, white cloud cover that offers no hint of the precipitation darkening the skies and pelting the earth's surface far below – there is a silence, a tranquility and even an implicit suspension of time that any frequent airline passenger knows well. 

At nightfall, obscurity can lead to revelation.  As dusk descends, objects that appeared so clear and determined in the light of day disintegrate into the folds of a gathering gloom, causing convictions about the nature of reality to waver, perhaps even dissolve along with the contours of a physical world immersed in night. 

The art of Xuhong Shang has long drawn impetus from a yearning for things indefinable.  Taking uncertainty itself as an object of pursuit, his work has made a practice of striving for what is by its very nature elusive, as amorphous and insubstantial as a play of light on rippling water.  Previously, the source of Shang's yearning and the nature of his striving were general enough for his art to encompass issues as wide ranging as the problem of self-definition, the difficulty of relating the present to the future in terms of causality, and the impossibility of understanding even the immediacy of the present in any comprehensive manner.