Interview with Hua Gallery artist

Interview with Hua Gallery artist, Xuhong Shang

1.) How and why did you begin studying art?

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.

2.) You used many traditional Chinese art forms in your works, such as the paper kites in “A Paradise Up in the Air” and the hanging scroll in the “Virtual Series”. What role does traditional Chinese art play in your own art?

In a complex world like ours that is so globalized, I don’t deliberately seek out Chinese elements. The spirit of Chinese culture cannot be found by only looking at the surface of it. What I care about most is how viewers experience and perceive my work. The spirit of traditional Chinese culture is a force that naturally flows through the artworks.

3.) In the “Virtual Series”, you used acrylic on canvas made as a Chinese hanging scroll. It reflects that you want to pursue the ease and gracefulness of traditional Chinese art by using modern materials. Do you regard traditional Chinese art as an aesthetic portraying Utopian ideals that contradict modern realities?

In the “Virtual Series”, I recall the visual force that is found in traditional Chinese landscape paintings, which pushes the viewers away from the images to a viewpoint where they can see the entire landscape in a single glance. This is contrary to Western perspective, which often draws the viewer’s focal point closer to an image. Pushing the viewer away from the images might be a way to cut them loose, or to allow them to raise questions, or simply to awe them. We hardly recognize this visual force any more; this might be because we are used to viewing things from afar on modern aircrafts, or maybe we have already distanced ourselves from nature without realizing it.

I applied acrylic diluted with water to the back of the canvases, and let the paint permeate the canvas naturally. It resulted in organically abstract images on the front that were both visually elegant and spontaneous. The natural and spontaneous qualities mirror the Taoist concept of non-doing, according to which one becomes in harmony with the universe by behaving naturally.

4.) You finished most of your education in art in the US. Why did you choose to create your multi-media art of this time period with traditional Chinese art elements? What aspects do you find that your work shares with traditional Chinese art?

I hope to create a general atmosphere that the viewer can feel. I’m not interested in portraying specific elements and stereotypes. I believe every viewer has his or her own way to explain the relationship between the true and the false, the real and the imaginary. This uncertainty is the challenge that I’m facing. The idea of coexistence between the tangible and the intangible in traditional Chinese art has inspired me, and I’m exploring the uncertainty of reality.

5.) We found the work “Pond” very interesting. It blurs the boundry between illusion and reality, the realistic and the artistic, two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality. What do you want to convey through this work?

The ambiguity in my work expresses the uncertainty of reality. We ourselves have caused such uncertainty. The fact is, our conscience has created names for things around us, thus generating a sense of distance and, essentially, the world where we live. The conflicting relationships that we experience are all based on a structure built by our cultural background, our imagination, and ourselves. However, this intricately designed structure only has bubble-like permanence; it is just as conflicting as everything else in the world.

6.) You used paper kites and industrial fans in your work “A Paradise Up in the Air”, and created a poetic scene in an industrial setting. Do the paper kites represent a fragile dream world? Or does it represent something else? What inspired you to create that melancholic, yet beautiful work?

People have been worried about air travel since the September 11th attacks and other similar terrorist activities afterwards. The feeling of uncertainty has become a phenomenon. I did a photographic series about airports, and the installation “A Paradise up in the Air” is the continuation of that series. White curtains surround the installation; inside the white curtains, white kites fly aimlessly as they cannot get out. One has to face uncertainty in his or her journey alone.

7.) Could you talk about your work “Random”? What do you want to convey through this work?

The ‘Random’ series of paintings will be put on a wall in a random order, just like damp leaves that stick to garden walls. The black-colored shapes are shown on backgrounds with simple colors, and they don’t really correspond with the viewer’s usual perception. They seemingly have some kind of meaning, but they are placed in a way that makes it difficult to tell what that is. They are indefinite answers to indefinite questions.