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.
Glen R. Brown, Ph.D. Art Critic, Art Historian (U.S.A)
About the Artist
Born in Shanghai, China. He received my M.F.A degree in Painting from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1992. For the past twenty years, he has exhibited my work in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Philadelphia, Geneva, Vienna, Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Kumamoto, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai. He has exhibited at such venues as Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut; Contemporary Art Museum in Baltimore; Mitchell Museum, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan; Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art; Kumamoto Fine Arts Museum; Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago; Leda Fletcher Gallery in Geneva; Contrasts Gallery and Stir Gallery in Shanghai. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts/Southern Art Federation Regional Visual Arts Fellowship (1995); and Art Matters Fellowship (1993). Articles have been written on his work in Sculpture, Art Papers and Asian Art News magazines as well as in such newspapers as of The Atlanta Constitution, Nashville Scene, etc.
His art work has been included in books and catalogs such as New American Paintings (Vol.16); International Young Art 2000, Sotheby’s; Euro Art 2000, BCN Art Directe's of Barcelona, Spain; and Mapping The Self, Telfair Museum of Art; also a book/catalog titled Representation / Reality, Xuhong Shang published by Plum Blossoms International Ltd., in the spring of 2001. A catalog titled Xuhong Shang/Momentary published by Mitchell Museum at Cedarhurst Center for the Arts in May 2007. He maintains studios both in USA and in Shanghai, China.
