ILLUSTRATED:

Transposed-Position Reality in Shen Xiaotong's
MPaintings

Text / Li Chao

Shen Xiaotong, who started in academia in the late 1980s, has a sensitive consciousness and experience in the printmaking profession and gives a new language for looking at oil paintings. Like fragments of memories or echoes of dreams, all images are seemingly at once so far from and so close to us. Like Shen's other works, the present particular work involves four figures appearing at different positions in the painting and their eyes gazing in different directions. Without the exact intentions of the figures' behaviour, it is hard to describe because of their ambiguity. What the painter implies in his psychology is rather mysterious. Trying to construct a scene of coldness among people, this work deals with something which is already far from any connection with everyday life. Thus, it shows an atmosphere of loneliness, quietness and stillness, seemingly becoming a unique reflection of the painter's inner world. Here appear traces of youthful days which have once seen ups and downs, a stable state which is getting more mature, and other varieties. Therefore, this work unveils the painter's reflected world and his rich experience of life. In such kind of state, uniquely belonging to individuals, the painter obscurely but truly reveals his sense of being boundlessly lost.

Shen's works symbolically involve a contrast between general blue and light yellow. Meantime, they also represent a middle tone of going through between near and far, breaking through the structures of three-dimensional spatial form, and capturing various focuses of the camera in order to appear succinct but also balanced and harmonious. This kind of artistic idea is formed through the painter's several artistic activities over recent years. As a result, people's acceptance of his degree of full of visual intensity can be strengthened. Through Shen's artistic fulfillment, he gradually walks towards his own artistic state, and further realizes and discovers what Chinese artists of a new generation think about, worry about, pursue and achieve. Attention has gradually been widely paid to his art - not only because of this painter's unique visual forms, but also because of the profound spiritual connotations cultivated by him.

The artistic world that Shen creates is succinct, but not simple. One obvious subtlety is that the figures that the painter paints are not depicted as idealized types; rather, ordinary people can easily be found. The painter adopts a balanced attitude to look at life. The idea of being close to ordinary figures means that the painter's artistic fulfillment consists in a shifting of angles. In other words, the painter should look at the paintings by using a common status and representing his or other people in an equal and indifferent observation rather than criticizing by holding a certain high view taken in reality outside the paintings. Another subtlety is that the figures in the paintings are located on obvious positions and background is painted flatly and simply. This kind of arrangement represents a lack of elements depicting the imagery of scenes. However, it plays down the figures' statuses and professions. Under this cool and ambiguous gaze, postures and colours - being symbolic to figures - can be thus strengthened. Therefore, psychologically, a transposed-position reality can be brought about when viewers look at these paintings.

This kind of transposed-position reality offers the painter a potential experimental nature with regard to figurative paintings. In fact, Shen has lived through a contemporary artistic experiment. Relying on a more stable and healthier form, he neither entirely breaks up basic and cultivated framed art, nor uses means of peculiar installations, behaviours, and images to demonstrate radical and avant-garde effects. On the contrary, standing on visual experience of solid framed paintings, he replaces conventional realistic depictions. Instead, he uses psychological truth to stand for a reality-like state as well as using unique feelings to replace experience of everyday life in order to develop his own artistic expressive method. It is believed that, with brilliant expression of emotions and wonderful talent, his vigor and paintings' tranquility demonstrate that the creation of figurative oil paintings has a boundless developing space and can be used to explore new topics. It is also predicted that this young and vigorous painter's strengths and his artistic explorations have remarkable artistic prospects.