商徐宏
X u h o n g S h a n g
By Jerry Cullum
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.”)
The world is a vigorous illusion, Buddhism tells us. By contrast, the religions of Europe, Africa and the Arab world insist upon the world’s metaphysical solidity; our philosophy has usually thought of art as illusion, a mere representation of reality. Only recently has art been considered a reality in and of itself.
Marcel Duchamp, one of Shang’s influences, played with all of these perspectives. René Magritte brought the philosophical discussion to a wittily flat-footed conclusion with his picture of a pipe labeled “This is not a pipe.”
Shang’s installations explore many of the paradoxes of representation and reality. Although they often involve full-scale observation decks with real plants on them, what is observed from the deck is a sequence of paintings that virtually tells us, “This is not a landscape.”
The paintings appear on a shelf, or along the room’s baseboards. Wherever they appear, they depict the natural world meticulously, but often with impossible simultaneity. The sky appears in a succession of colors suggesting the movement from dawn through midday to evening twilight, so that a walk across the room is also a walk through hours of time. Or rather, it would be if the viewer were not looking down, at a thin strip of images, a reminder that the position of the body is real, but the Nature in the painting is not.
Or are both illusions, or are both different kinds of reality? Does the terminology matter? As the Buddhists ask, where is there any duality? It is the mind that gives names, makes distinctions, and creates the world it lives in. What we call “matter” is the base on which a convincing structure of reality is erected in the mind, by culture or by imagination.
Every so often, something happens to remind us that this elaborate structure has the solidity and permanence of a soap bubble. At its best, Xuhong Shang’s work provides this deeply cross-cultural experience of impermanence and unpredictability – a shock that, in mystical traditions, can lead to something more.
Like Duchamp, though with different motives, Shang means to be more than just a thumb-nosing bad boy; he wants to unsettle our expectations for our own good.
Jerry Cullum is an artist, poet, freelance curator and cultural critic. An editor of the Atlanta based magazine Art Papers, he writes frequently for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other publications.