The exhibition Sleep Walk includes two of Xuhong Shang’s recent painting series Virtual and The Moonbeam. It greatly examines Shang’s conceptual art materialized in the medium of painting.

Virtual series starts in 2010, using acrylic paints on the backside of the canvas to create justifiable images to relate viewers’ own experience and expectation. Whether being real or unreal, far or near, in distance or close-ups, and being transcended between heaven and earth, the imageries in the paintings would only be perceived and formed by viewers’ knowledge and conception.

The Moonbeam Series was completed in 2010. The paintings use a narrative style to illustrate moon eclipses to contrast the black cut-out canvas, and to create tension between the poetically eclipsed moons and the rudeness of canvas cutting. It presents a contextualized dichotomy that provides a sense of urgency and opens a debate that goes beyond our logics.