Negation and Challege:Psintings of Shen Muyang

By Lan Qingwei

On the Application of Brecht's Dramatic Theory in Contemporary Art, Shen Muyang's master's thesis completed in 2021, seems to mark a pivotal moment in the evolution of his artistic practice. Prior to this, especially around his undergraduate graduation in 2017, Brecht's dramatic theory was primarily applied to Shen Muyang's performance and video works. In I Am an Artist (2015), for instance, there is a clear dramatic construction: the work involves randomly interviewing passersby and asking them to say the line "I am an artist" to the camera. This displaced role-playing—reminiscent of an actor's audition—functions like an original genetic pairing for a theatrical play, comical and yet not without hope. In late 2018, Shen Muyang received the New Star Art Award with his nominated works The Disease of Conceit (2018) and The Road to Slavery (2018). Along with Busking (2018) and The Outsider (2021), these pieces reveal Shen Muyang's growing awareness of constructing scene-based images. In this collection of works, Shen Muyang expands his focus from role-building to scene-building. Though slightly absurd, these scenes are still composed of relatively familiar figures, landscapes, and narratives.

At the end of 2022, Shen Muyang held his solo exhibition Bionic Bureau at the Blue Roof Museum in Chengdu. The works presented in this exhibition departed from the scene constructions of his earlier pieces. Instead, as if zooming in with a camera lens, they severed the narrative threads of the scenes, and the relationships between figures grew increasingly simplified, corresponding to the emergence of a style defined by blocks of color. This shift appears at first glance to result from the magnifying and focusing effect of a theatrical lens, yet in fact it reveals a subjective turn in Shen Muyang's approach to constructing objects. In his earlier works, Shen Muyang seemed more like a participant within his own constructions—or a stagehand in a play—engaged in the act of participation itself. But after 2021, Shen Muyang transitioned from participant to developer, developing new scenes and new domains. The Echoes of Civilization series precisely constitutes Shen Muyang's first experiment as a developer. In Echoes of Civilization- Quasimodo, we cannot see the hunchback of Notre-Dame—kind-hearted yet hideous in appearance—because the "developer" obscures his face with a circular halo symbolizing sanctity, while Quasimodo's figure is rendered with the solemnity of the Virgin Mary in art history. Thus, Shen Muyang's new statements as a developer emerge one after another, sometimes retelling old stories, sometimes drawing from existing realities. At this stage, why does the artist exhibit such a pronounced turn toward the role of developer? As many critics of his generation have observed, Shen Muyang, born in the 1990s, grew up alongside his peers in an environment naturally intertwined with video games and artificial intelligence—a historical background for this generation of artists. Consequently, topics of reconstructing the virtual and the real, the human and the non-human, have organically entered the view of artists born in the 1990s. For Shen Muyang personally, the online world has not only given him the pleasure of gaming but has also provided a displacing perspective for his creative practice, prompting his artistic creation to shift from participating in scenes to constructing scenes. Through his unique "creative editing," he carries out a personal transformation of reality. This is the creative logic behind Shen Muyang's recent works. The exhibition Negation and Challenge is Shen Muyang's invitation to the viewers—an invitation to enter his "editorial world." The rule, however, is to decode his works according to his coding.

In an interview, Shen Muyang articulated his coding logic by quoting Wittgenstein's "picture theory of language": "The point is, as the subject of cognition, one must distinguish between the 'world' in one's mind and the 'world' of objective reality, so that in expressing the world, one can do so entirely on the basis of the facts of individual thought, rather than on 'objectivity'—because 'objectivity' is usually not objective at all." Shen Muyang leaves three clues for the viewers in his works. The first is his personal trajectory of creation, which provides a narrative foundation in the titles of the works. The second is the painterly construction of pure colors. The third is cognitive misreading and visual deviation. All three clues point toward a single purpose: to break free from visual habit. Beyond this, each of Shen Muyang's paintings to some extent incorporates the three primary colors—red, yellow, and blue. This is an unconscious act of artist, which inevitably brings to mind Mondrian's work. Primary colors, as part of Mondrian's philosophical manifesto, aimed at painting "pure reality." This is not to say that the three primary colors dominate Shen Muyang's works, but rather that they form the bedrock of his instinctive creative process: amid intense color contrasts, sometimes at the edges of contours or on an seemingly casual brushstroke, the addition of these three pure colors renders the picture more pristine.

There are two ways to interpret Negation and Challenge (“上线自反”, literally offline autonymie). The first arises from its literal meaning, which resonate with Shen Muyang's life and creative practice. On one hand, he is a gaming enthusiast; on the other, an artist. The boundary between these two identities lies in being "online" or "offline." What sets Shen Muyang apart, however, is his remarkable self-discipline: he arrives at his studio at seven every morning to work, plays games in the evening, and rests by ten. Whether "online" or "offline," the artist enters a professional domain. When "online," he inhabits his gaming avatars; when "offline," he enters into "self-reflection" (autonymie)—a state of continuous self-interrogation and critical engagement with his own pictorial practice. The second interpretation draws on philosophical and modern concepts, offering a description of his creative and spiritual condition. "Offline" points to the relationship between the "self" and the "they" . In Section 27 of Heidegger's Being and Time, Everyday Being-one's-Self and the "They" it is written: "Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The 'they', which supplies the answer to the question of the 'who' of everyday Dasein, is the 'nobody' to whom every Dasein has already surrendered itself in Being-among-one-other." The online world is often described as a parallel world to physical reality; people constantly move between these two realms. Beyond transnational ethnicity and identity, there exists an identity situated between the real and the virtual—the "self" is the "they", yet the "they" is the "nobody", while reality nonetheless pushes the self toward conformity with the "they"'s rules of intelligibility. In Shen Muyang's practice, "offline" is the act of breaking the rules of the "they"—like a creator, engaging in self-construction according to his own custom codes. "The concept of 'reflexive modernity' may be distinguished from a fundamental misunderstanding: it does not mean reflection (as suggested by its adjective 'reflexive'), but, first and foremost, self-confrontation." To speak of modernity today may seem somewhat outdated; yet, stripped of its temporal dimension, modernity is essentially an intellectual concern. "Autonymie" is akin to the closing line of Baudelaire's poem No. 126 in the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal: "To fathom the Unknown, and find the new!" (Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!). Such is Shen Muyang's creative spirit.