ILLUSTRATED:

Among a host of contemporary Chinese artists, Shen Xiaotong stands out as someone whose figural paintings and portraits exude a particularly appealing peacefulness and tranquility.

After graduating from the Art Print Department at Sichuan Fine Arts College, Shen (born 1968 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province) soon established himself as a much-touted and highly original master of terse but profound visual images.

His works look deceptively simple, especially when you consider that he produces them with the help of digital video techniques. Usually we see quietly elegant or even plain and utterly mundane faces with intentionally accentuated black eyeballs. In 2005 No. 12, contrasting shades of soft blue and pastelish yellow cover the entire surface of the canvas, while each face seems to be at the centre of its own focal point, giving the whole composition a subtly surreal and hyper-dimensional appearance, striking yet balanced and harmonious.

What is reflected in Shen's rather stark depictions is of course the artist's inner world. In these figures and their seemingly apathetic faces we can catch a glimpse of Shen's long years at the fringe of art circles and society. We learn a little bit about an individual always eager to maintain a certain distance between himself and his environment,and someone who made good use of long years of silence to mature from an impetuous youngster to an accomplished painter with amazing creative powers.

Despite his some what detached perspective, Shen's eye-level views of his subjects aptly mirror the fact that he considers himself very much a part of the everyday world, on the same level as the figures he dispassionately puts onto canvas. As in most of his works, in 2005 No.12 the monochromatic background further sets off the dominant position of the human figures, but on the whole the painting's structure is quite static, which jibes perfectly with Shen's intention to focus on his subjects' appearance per se, people stripped almost completely of outward signs of status or profession and suspended in a state of calculated vagueness . At the same time , this approach allows the artist to put unusual emphasis on the figures' symbolic poses and coloring, and the overall result is a sense of dislocation providing audiences with a now outlook on reality. Shen's interesting take on modern art's experimentalist side is to stay true to traditional canvas painting in all its formal aspects, including a solid training and well-honed skills. Instead of severing all ties to conventional techniques, or relying on installation, behavioral or multimedia art forms to generate 'radical' or 'avant-garde' artistic effects, he employs the visual language of canvas art but juxtaposes its realistic elements to create unique imageries. What matters in these pictures is not superficial representation, but genuine emotional depth, not the routine of daily life, but the exceptional moments of poignant significance we experience now and then.