Art+ Shanghai’s new group exhibition “The Palpable Soul of the Surface” inaugurates the year of 2018 featuring three new artists of the gallery – Fu Shuai, Liu Xi and Xiong Yanjun. Three artists animate their artwork with the rich and scrupulously elaborated texture. Fu Shuai borrows the techniques of Chinese rubbing in order to produce the paper which he incorporates in his stunning optical illusions. Liu Xi’s appropriates new formations to craft her immaculately produced, offbeat porcelain objects. Xiong Yanjun’s raises an open-ended question in his seemingly monochromatic paintings with an extraordinary subtle range of colors. Each work on show carries the human presence that appears in the form of traces left by the hand of the artist. You feel it through the enigmatic markings inscribed or sculpted on the surface of Xiong Yanjun’s paintings, you imagine a careful yet firm hand casting sensual shapes of Liu Xi’s sculptures, and almost see the repetitive movements of Fu Shuai’s thorough hand applying layers of paint on a thin ‘xuan’ paper to produce a hyper realistic texture of a rusting iron sheet or a wooden frame. Informed by a great organizing artistic intelligence, technical and emotional sophistication, thoroughly worked surfaces seem to radiate the wisdom of the universe and a serene dignity of the creator.

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