A Desolate Dream, Space Station Gallery, Beijing,2012
"Postmodern ideology often emerges at the bottom of a social energy curve, just like a wild rebound in a soft, hesitant sinking. This must be a rebound of vitality in the world based on economy, technology, politics, and culture."--------Nicholas Buriot
In 1989, on the night of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, people excitedly gathered together and received free drinks from West Berlin Company from loading trucks labeled "Coca Cola". However, capital crossing boundaries did not create a situation where one side ruled over the other. The two major camps collapsed in the merger of globalization, then diluted and neutralized each other. Under the leadership of the neoliberal movement, the developed capitalist market has dragged the entire society into the abyss of comprehensive marketization and financialization. The control of the financial and art markets by a few individuals has led to an increasingly centralized social and cultural control system. Its inherent aggressiveness and singularity have led emerging individuals who boast of independent spirit to converge with each other and become appendages of capital groups. This makes artists realize that they are actually facing a seemingly diverse and increasingly shrinking cultural system. In Asia, as emerging countries experience economic boom, the traditional framework based superstructure is almost overturned, and the so-called purity of values and art is completely broken down and questioned. Fragments of wandering individuals are scattered in various corners of society. However, the loose vitality contained in emerging economies will inevitably deeply amplify the entire global cultural system, with some people embracing avant-garde ideas and hoping to join the new world with a new attitude. And another group of people go back to the past, trying to build new operating mechanisms by reviving tradition. In fact, both are steadfastly seeking a new mode of coexistence, a new mode of exchange, and a new mode of communication, consciously or unconsciously - a world waiting to be built. Young artists must return to their own perspective in order to build effective mechanisms. Culture has shifted from imitation to autonomy.
Shang Chengxiang's metaphorical combination of machinery and landscape highlights the sensitivity unique to the industrial era that sets him apart from his contemporaries. The abandoned large machines, the intimidating torture and death of whales, seem to suggest the ultimate destination for all great powers to escape decline. The former glory has become today's apocalyptic lament, a deep questioning of the authenticity of daily life, and a deep concern for machinery and self have led his paintings into the world of individual mythology. This is not entirely reminiscent of the changes in capitalist ideology over the past 300 years: from the nomadic plot of the Age of Discovery to the self anchoring of a sense of belonging in postmodern society; From the grand fantasy of constructing the world in the oil age to the humble and powerless individuals in the financial society. In a compressed and constantly transforming history, young artists no longer pursue a definite self-expression, but instead connect ideological gaps rich in the imprints of the times with constantly changing personal experiences, making it look more like a compressed matrix that gathers experiences of a backward industrial society.
Postmodernity has completely become a hollow and fluid concept, which reminds people of Zigmund Bauman's "liquid modernity" and Ulrich Beck's turbulent mentality in the "risk society". The viscous state of society and culture means the formation of an undecomposed adhesion and mixing in the movement of liquid mixing. The young body must be open to both naturalistic philosophy and the globalized capitalist system, and inevitably reveal the dizziness, desolation, suspension, unease, and cynicism unique to postmodernism. Across from them, there is only life that is almost hysterical. Artists have to rely on the unconscious energy stimulated by surrealism to transcend chaos and immerse themselves in the eternal fluctuations brought about by mixed capitalism.
In 1989, on the night of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, people excitedly gathered together and received free drinks from West Berlin Company from loading trucks labeled "Coca Cola". However, capital crossing boundaries did not create a situation where one side ruled over the other. The two major camps collapsed in the merger of globalization, then diluted and neutralized each other. Under the leadership of the neoliberal movement, the developed capitalist market has dragged the entire society into the abyss of comprehensive marketization and financialization. The control of the financial and art markets by a few individuals has led to an increasingly centralized social and cultural control system. Its inherent aggressiveness and singularity have led emerging individuals who boast of independent spirit to converge with each other and become appendages of capital groups. This makes artists realize that they are actually facing a seemingly diverse and increasingly shrinking cultural system. In Asia, as emerging countries experience economic boom, the traditional framework based superstructure is almost overturned, and the so-called purity of values and art is completely broken down and questioned. Fragments of wandering individuals are scattered in various corners of society. However, the loose vitality contained in emerging economies will inevitably deeply amplify the entire global cultural system, with some people embracing avant-garde ideas and hoping to join the new world with a new attitude. And another group of people go back to the past, trying to build new operating mechanisms by reviving tradition. In fact, both are steadfastly seeking a new mode of coexistence, a new mode of exchange, and a new mode of communication, consciously or unconsciously - a world waiting to be built. Young artists must return to their own perspective in order to build effective mechanisms. Culture has shifted from imitation to autonomy.
Shang Chengxiang's metaphorical combination of machinery and landscape highlights the sensitivity unique to the industrial era that sets him apart from his contemporaries. The abandoned large machines, the intimidating torture and death of whales, seem to suggest the ultimate destination for all great powers to escape decline. The former glory has become today's apocalyptic lament, a deep questioning of the authenticity of daily life, and a deep concern for machinery and self have led his paintings into the world of individual mythology. This is not entirely reminiscent of the changes in capitalist ideology over the past 300 years: from the nomadic plot of the Age of Discovery to the self anchoring of a sense of belonging in postmodern society; From the grand fantasy of constructing the world in the oil age to the humble and powerless individuals in the financial society. In a compressed and constantly transforming history, young artists no longer pursue a definite self-expression, but instead connect ideological gaps rich in the imprints of the times with constantly changing personal experiences, making it look more like a compressed matrix that gathers experiences of a backward industrial society.
Postmodernity has completely become a hollow and fluid concept, which reminds people of Zigmund Bauman's "liquid modernity" and Ulrich Beck's turbulent mentality in the "risk society". The viscous state of society and culture means the formation of an undecomposed adhesion and mixing in the movement of liquid mixing. The young body must be open to both naturalistic philosophy and the globalized capitalist system, and inevitably reveal the dizziness, desolation, suspension, unease, and cynicism unique to postmodernism. Across from them, there is only life that is almost hysterical. Artists have to rely on the unconscious energy stimulated by surrealism to transcend chaos and immerse themselves in the eternal fluctuations brought about by mixed capitalism.