MadeIn Gallery is honored to present Shang Liang’s latest exhibition “Coexistence Makes Human Being”. The exhibition will take place from 12 September to 26 October 2024 and will be the artist’s third solo exhibition at the Gallery. It shows the way in which Shang reflectively uses her surrealist heritage and steers stereotyped representations of reality towards the absurd. The exhibition also illustrates how she adapts her relationship with reality to her own intentions, thus balancing and achieving coexistence between the ideal with the distorted, the elegant with the wild, the human with the non-human.

With its roots in and defying of portraiture, Shang’s oil painting induces illogic and astonishment through the surreal and an intervention of unsettling images. Sensing an omnipresent anxiety that causes a visible alienation of humanity, the artist is convinced that painting has to reach beyond a mere reflection of reality and that creation must take place on a psychological level, “merging with one’s personality”, as well as on an intellectual one, “diagnosing one’s personality and the world”.

In the works on display at the Gallery, Shang continues her previous technique of alienating humans into variations of biomorphic figures that belong to herself. Recognizability and anonymity are reconciled in such features as the human skin bestowed with sheen texture, the fingers turned into gun barrels, and the mouths replacing facial features with a sinister smile. Historically, biomorphism refers to the artistic movement where artists, represented by Joan Miró, draw inspiration from or imitate living forms in nature. In Shang’s thinking and practice, humans are re-positioned as one of nature’s creatures, an object of posthuman imitation rather than life drawing. Using humanoid forms, she attempts to redefine the understanding of the human species, which needs urgent liberation now that human beings are reduced to market relations, religious postures, and a continuous revolt against suffering.