MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present artist Shang Liang’s solo exhibition “Mortal at the Helm”, opening on March 20th, 2021. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition in the gallery. Shang Liang’s art practices focus on the ritualized body in human life and the visual symbolization of portraiture, creating a unique visual symbol and language that are different from traditional portraits.

The artist’s solo exhibition in 2019, “New Order”, has once announced the birth of an independent species with a distinctive and strong visual image, which is not only full of heroic physical capacity, strength, and authority, but also constitutes a vague metaphor of loneliness and contradiction. While this exhibition gathers the artist’s in-depth development of the visual image in the following two years since 2019, and extends from painting to the field of sculpture.

Shang Liang’s creation develops from “The Real Boy” series to the later “Good Hunter”, “Sofa Man” and “Boxing Man” series. These muscular new species with labels of body and strength express mankind’s on-going demand for image-creating. This is not only a way to record, imitate, and pass on to the world, but also the power to reshape mythology and the ideal world. It is a way for “mortals” to try to grasp, influence, and control the world, but still carries blurry manipulation of the body and subtle competition against the outside world.

As the subject of mass fascination and consumption, the image of teenager in “Good Hunter” series possesses primitive animality and the exposed violence that hasn’t been domesticated by society. Their posture is borrowed from the ancient Egyptian and Greek statues in western sculpture and painting traditions – they are considered the idealized human bodies with divinity, endowed with eternity in body, physique and spirit. In another series “Sofa Man”, the artist uses an almost exaggerated painting technique to present an ambiguous image, where a group of human with bloated muscles are trapped in the sofa. It visually conveys a soft touch, as well as the delicate relationship between body and mind. And the “Boxing Man” series directly deprives the face and organs of human with the reconstructed unknown, and replaces the head with the image of boxing gloves. The image in the series gradually evolve and mutate in the miniature arena presented in the artist’s works, thus declaring the game order of the new world.