《Corporeal Musings 》
In the discourse of contemporary art, the body is always placed in the central position of being watched, written, and projected. From Foucault’s investigation of corporeal discipline, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “body without organ” (Corps sans organs), all the way to Merleau-Ponty’s “sense experience”, the body is constantly placed in the crossing point of political, sensual, and semiotic frameworks. Two artists born in the 1980s, Shi Yanliang and Sun Yu, approach the body respectively from the stretch marks of social structure and the mechanism of painterly production, making it into a space of appearance, disappearance, and re-construction. From personal emotion to societal parable, they construct a multi-narrative space about the body.
Through Deleuze’s take of Leibniz’s “fold”, the body is not a concrete subject but rather a fold under the power of time. To a certain degree, Shi’s work can be interpreted as the imagery precipitation of societal structure. The pictorial body suspends into a state of half-symbol and half-metaphor. A relationship of distortion and suspension constantly emerges in-between human and object, animal and narrative. These images are not emotional narratives but patent marks left by societal experiences on the individuals. Through a highly sensitive gaze of reality, Shi puts body into the spiritual landscape of China’s societal metamorphosis.
Shi’s pictorial space does not rely on narrative integrity. Through the compounded relationship among symbols, fables, and structural omission, he puts pictorial images in a compressed space. The relationship among light, background, and subject is distant as well as tense, presenting a static tension. Heart Tigers explores the tension between internal desire and external discipline through the juxtaposition of body and animal. Feast No.5 distills the sense of group identity and generational ceremony though the static image of pictorial objects. Corridor is not only a spatial structure but more so a metaphoric ally where the body enters, leaves, stays, and passes through, echoing to Shi’s aesthetic pursuit of “omission” in his new series. As a key optical language, omission places the body into a state of suspension. Its blurring combination of presence and an absence suggests the state of ambiguity and revolt in real life.
Different from Shi’s gaze of societal reality, Sun’s artistic creativity originates from the interior logic of painting. He does not anticipate the pictorial image but paints freely on the canvas, waiting for the image to emerge from ambiguity, therefore giving visualization to emotions and memories. This creative method of “body before mind” itself is already a bodily presence. In works like Beauty’s Peak, Small Waist, and Tactical Contraction, bodily parts are condensed into visual and emotional formal symbols. The canvas is no longer the medium of paint but more so the “container of mind”, holding within itself the unspoken experiences hidden beneath one’s consciousness.
Sun’s pictorial body is a self-forming ecology. For instance, Mutual Effect, as well as Drink Together presents the body’s coordination and confrontation in societal relations. Its postures are abstracted into symmetry, contortion, and centripetal force through the collision of lines, colors, and structures. By rewriting the bodily structure, these abstractions become the node points of rhythm, directions of power, and kinetic centers of pictorial structure. In the pictorial plane, this kind of body is not “being seen” but “being made”.
The two artists together put the body as the theatre of metaphor. While Shi Yanliang presents the situation of the body amid societal metamorphosis through concrete symbolism and narrative omission, Sun Yu unveils the body’s deeper structure in memory and emotion. Their works also make an interesting contrast: a double gaze towards the corporeal “external world” and “internal structure”. One observes from the exterior into the interior, withholding the marks of time; the other develops from the interior to the exterior, originating from the unconscious and the emotional. Together they build a metaphoric space of discourse, lighting up not only the weight of reality but also the depth of imagination.
EXHIBITING WORKS
Artists
Sun Yu
b. 1982, Jilin, China
Born in Jilin, China in 1982, Sun Yu graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. Through years of rigorous academic training, he honed a distinctive creative approach that allows him to interact with the blank canvas. He never predetermines what the composition should be at the outset, instead applying paint freely across the surface until indistinct forms emerge. This process triggers specific emotional states and fragments of memory, which he then renders tangibly. Consequently, his practice does not begin with painterly intent but rather establishes a structure within which content organically evolves.
When he creates a new foundation for narrative, transcending existing frameworks, the canvas ceases to be merely a pictorial element. It becomes a vessel, allowing ideas buried beneath the surface, the most fundamental thoughts within the psyche, the opportunity for free expression. Sun Yu seeks to discover the inevitable within the accidental.
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Shi Yanliang
b. 1981, Shandong, China
Born in 1981 in Zhucheng, Shandong Province, Shi Yanliang studied at the Mural Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts from 2004 to 2008. He now lives and works in Beijing.
Some of Shi Yanliang's works use the city's gorgeous light as the background, supplemented by his worries about the maze of the times; some of them meticulously polish a corner of the room, showing his experiments in aesthetic interests. The reorganization of visual symbols describes his confusion about meaning. The main characters in the paintings are people, animals, and food, but for Shi Yanliang, they are all “objects standing still in this moment”. The artist is in a phase of transition from personal growth to family responsibilities, a new era of rapidly changing media, and a time when meaning is constantly being overridden by new meanings.
Shi Yanliang’s profound gaze into the folds of the times and individual circumstances weaves his recent creative veins into a series of metaphorical scenes. The afterglow of the setting
sun, animal fables, the mirrored images of men and women, and frozen everyday objects form a complex narrative of the spiritual landscape during China’s social transition period. Shi Yanliang did not intend to use still life as a theme for his works, but the contradictory nature of his original intention and the focus of his paintings made still life paintings a channel for interpretation. His new series of creations tend more towards doing "subtraction" for the paintings. The blank spaces and pushed-open doors in the frames are like the "unknown" in life—full of uncertainty yet boundless possibilities, left unfinished. What appears to be the vacant "blankness" has actually undergone multiple layers of brushstrokes. Is it "painted" or "unpainted"? It is as if we repeat our lives every day, leaving behind plain colors.
His recent exhibitions include 2025 The Human Comedy - Hangzhou Restaurant" - Shi Yanliang Solo Exhibition, Cycle Space, Beijing; 2024 Angels and Flesh – New Still Lifes of Shi Yanliang, Cycle Space, Beijing; 2023 Shi Yanliang ArtPro Exhibitions Recommended By Collectors (ArtPro Space, Beijing), 2022 DAILY METAPHORS Shi Yanliang (hiart space, Beijing), 2021CARTOON BUBBLE- SHI YANLIANG SOLO EXHIBITION (PENGS SPACE, Shenzhen), 2020Sunset Glow Shi Yanliang(hiart Center, Shenzhen), 2010 Watermelon Mountain(Hanmo Art Gallery, Beijing). His works have also been exhibited at the National Art Museum of China, He Xiangning Art Museum, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, CAFA Art Museum, CAAM, Guardian Art Center and other institutions. His works were collected by White Rabbit Gallery, Whale Art Museum.