​商徐宏

When Night Falls:

By Glen R. Brown, Ph.D. Art Critic, Art Historian (U.S.A)

 

 

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.  As darkness creeps over forests and meadows, suburbs and skyscrapers, our little Earth merges with the velvety blackness of a vast and mysterious universe, rendering what seemed finite suddenly infinite.  As objects yield themselves up to the dark lamp of revelation that is the night, a thousand small epiphanies prompt Socratic wisdom – a knowing that we do not know – and plunge our world of experience into a realm of shadows.

 

When Night Falls is the latest of Xuhong Shang's exhibitions to conjure the elusiveness of absolutes and the ultimate ambiguity of definitions.  Small paintings of the Random series hang haphazardly on two sides of the gallery, like wet, wind-blown leaves adhering momentarily to a garden wall.  Their images – black forms against monochrome gradients – defy the mind's grasp, even as they suggest objects that one ought to recognize.  Elusive, too, are the cryptic texts scrawled across the irregularly shaped canvases of the Moonbeam series, which suspends suggestions of the night sky tenuously from pushpins. 

 

Night in the guise of a black butterfly, its sheer wings as impalpable as the surrounding air, floats on an unseen current, while a layer of darkness encases the buildings of a silent city, removing them from the compass of the inquisitive eye and mind.  On the gallery floor, eight works from the Virtual series, created by squeezing black acrylic paint through the threads of blank canvases, suggest the surface of the earth photographed in black and white from a satellite or an outpost on the moon.  Darkness, distance, indistinctness and ambiguity are devices more fundamental than forms in Shang's When Night Falls, and the results are meanings as elusive and infinite as the night itself.