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Fu Shuai
7th Sep - 27th Oct 2019
191 South Suzhou Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, China, 20002
Xia_Xi is Fu Shuai’s inaugural solo exhibition in Shanghai held at Art+ Shanghai Gallery from September 7th to October 27th, 2019. Following his first successful appearance in the group show “The Palpable Soul of the Surface” in early 2018, Art+ Shаnghai Gallery is unveiling his new series of work produced over the past two years.
The exhibition exemplifies Fu Shuai’s underpinning thematic preoccupations focusing on reality and its deceptive appearance facilitated by the advent and omnipresence of technologies in our daily life. It is the confrontation of the real versus virtual, and people’s ever degenerative cognitive capability to discern between the two that have inspired the concept and aesthetics of his new
In Chinese [xià xì] 罅隙 is an archaic word for a crack or gap. Since the word is not much in use anymore, for some younger generation of Chinese people and non-Chinese language speakers the necessity to understand the word would most probably prompt a quick search online. It is for this reason, when used in the title of the exhibition, the word has been enclosed in the angle brackets - the symbol used by the programmers in the markup language to display the text in the web browser. This simple example illustrates how super-computers carried in our pockets at all times have truly become the extension of our daily reality. In every home, on every desk, in every palm - a plasma screen, a monitor, a smartphone - illuminating the 21st-century existence and reflecting it back us.
The Xia_Xi series is the artist’s critical pictorial reflection on the digital domain that has solidly established itself as an indispensable dimension of our reality: mobile supercomputing, intelligent robots and softwares, self-operated devices, neurotechnological brain enhancements, genetic editing, virtual and augmented realities… This new technologically transmuted reality fuses digital, physical and biological worlds, touching upon every possible discipline to the point it begins to challenge the idea of what it means to be real and what it means to be human…
It is this gaping wound in our collective consciousness and the effect it has on our capability to tell apart reality from its virtually enhanced simulation that Fu Shuai is referring to in his new Xia_Xi series. His works present a vivid pictorial metaphor juxtaposing the ethereal omnipresence of the virtual amid the tangible materiality of the real.
With no identifiable subject matter, his works are reduced to crisply outlined shapes, contrasting textural planes, and seamlessly enchased optical illusions. With the protruding visual forms, hidden photographs, embedded hardware elements, and the hyperrealist sense of the rusty metallic textures created with the technique of Chinese stone rubbing, Fu Shuai tests our sensibility of dimensionality and reality, irrefutably proving the fallibility of human’s perception.
Fu Shuai’s work is a reply of a thinking artist, on the one hand, to the restless and high-tech euphoria from which we both suffer, benefit and know to be our future, and on the other to the permanently lurking threat of virtual nothingness. The striking contrast that Fu Shuai creates with the help of color, texture, and composition illustrates the real-life battlefield between the familiar reality of the tangible and looming enigma of what is yet to come.
Xia_Xi is Fu Shuai’s inaugural solo exhibition in Shanghai held at Art+ Shanghai Gallery from September 7th to October 27th, 2019. Following his first successful appearance in the group show “The Palpable Soul of the Surface” in early 2018, Art+ Shаnghai Gallery is unveiling his new series of work produced over the past two years.
The exhibition exemplifies Fu Shuai’s underpinning thematic preoccupations focusing on reality and its deceptive appearance facilitated by the advent and omnipresence of technologies in our daily life. It is the confrontation of the real versus virtual, and people’s ever degenerative cognitive capability to discern between the two that have inspired the concept and aesthetics of his new
In Chinese [xià xì] 罅隙 is an archaic word for a crack or gap. Since the word is not much in use anymore, for some younger generation of Chinese people and non-Chinese language speakers the necessity to understand the word would most probably prompt a quick search online. It is for this reason, when used in the title of the exhibition, the word has been enclosed in the angle brackets - the symbol used by the programmers in the markup language to display the text in the web browser. This simple example illustrates how super-computers carried in our pockets at all times have truly become the extension of our daily reality. In every home, on every desk, in every palm - a plasma screen, a monitor, a smartphone - illuminating the 21st-century existence and reflecting it back us.
The Xia_Xi series is the artist’s critical pictorial reflection on the digital domain that has solidly established itself as an indispensable dimension of our reality: mobile supercomputing, intelligent robots and softwares, self-operated devices, neurotechnological brain enhancements, genetic editing, virtual and augmented realities… This new technologically transmuted reality fuses digital, physical and biological worlds, touching upon every possible discipline to the point it begins to challenge the idea of what it means to be real and what it means to be human…
It is this gaping wound in our collective consciousness and the effect it has on our capability to tell apart reality from its virtually enhanced simulation that Fu Shuai is referring to in his new Xia_Xi series. His works present a vivid pictorial metaphor juxtaposing the ethereal omnipresence of the virtual amid the tangible materiality of the real.
With no identifiable subject matter, his works are reduced to crisply outlined shapes, contrasting textural planes, and seamlessly enchased optical illusions. With the protruding visual forms, hidden photographs, embedded hardware elements, and the hyperrealist sense of the rusty metallic textures created with the technique of Chinese stone rubbing, Fu Shuai tests our sensibility of dimensionality and reality, irrefutably proving the fallibility of human’s perception.
Fu Shuai’s work is a reply of a thinking artist, on the one hand, to the restless and high-tech euphoria from which we both suffer, benefit and know to be our future, and on the other to the permanently lurking threat of virtual nothingness. The striking contrast that Fu Shuai creates with the help of color, texture, and composition illustrates the real-life battlefield between the familiar reality of the tangible and looming enigma of what is yet to come.
