James Cohan Gallery Shanghai is pleased to present its summer exhibition by two young Shanghai-based artists, James H. Bollen and Li Wenguang.

James H. Bollen’s exhibition features twelve color photographs from his recently completed book-length project, and the title of his debut exhibition, Jim’s Terrible City. The photographs are inspired by the legendary British writer J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), and Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 in what was then known as the International Settlement. Through extensive readings of Ballard’s highly visual fiction, Bollen explores a literary past and heritage of Shanghai with his own painterly photographic language. The twelve images in the exhibition—all sharing a sense of the unreal—construct an urban landscape where time ceases to exist and life becomes like a stage set. In Bollen’s eyes, violence, flight, car crashes, the incongruities of time and life can seem so immediately cinematic, or a like a ghostly glimpse of life experienced by J.G. Ballard while living in Shanghai during the Japanese Occupation. Many of these themes and images can be tracked throughout J.G. Ballard’s writings, where a near-hallucinatory state of mind merges memories of a Shanghai past while continuing to exist in the city’s present.

While James Bollen is mapping the city’s past and present, in the second gallery, Li Wenguang is charting the boundaries of the knowledge. Fallacy, in Li Wenguang’s words, is the origin of his distinctive abstract equations, which the artist uses to explain his own momentary existence in the present. These highly personal, idiosyncratic renderings, often diagrammatic and architectural in form, are as much about belief as about misconception; about the basis of knowledge versus the bittersweet qualities of the absurd. Li, who is a completely self-taught artist, presents his finely detailed works on rice paper mounted to traditional Chinese silk scrolls using a combination of pen, brush, Chinese ink and acrylic paint. Through his dynamic use of these materials, Li Wenguang is exploring images and subject matter where we sometimes have limited or little knowledge in the realm of dreams and the act of dreaming, or what the artist himself defines as his ‘pseudoscience’: a system of belief or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on verifiable scientific methodology.

James H. Bollen is a graduate of School of African and Oriental Studies, London University. His work has been shown at the Beach London Gallery, London (2012), SH Contemporary Art Fair, Shanghai (2011) and FotoGrafia Festival Internazionale di Roma, Rome (2010). He works and lives in Shanghai.

Li Wenguang was born in Shanghai. His work has been the subject of a solo exhibition at Stir Gallery Shanghai in 2011; Huating Space Shanghai, Songjiang, Shanghai (2011, 2010); and most recently his work has been exhibited at the Shangyuan Art Museum, Beijing, 2012.