Liang Shuo
Distant Tantamount Mountain
Artist
- Liang Shuo
Curator
- Johan Holten
Curatorial assistance
- Lisa Bensel
This is Chinese artist Liang Shuo´s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, and it will transform the veneral exhibition space of Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden into an experimental ground. The artist will not bring anything with him. This can be understood as a commentary on the abundant production of things in China. He will bring no paintings, no sculptures, no videos, no photographs, and no other objects but will look for his materials on-site instead.
In the process of setting up the exhibition a theme will emerge from these materials, one that will depend entirely on the circumstances in which it is created. Over a series of exhibitions, the artist has refined this approach, in which he adheres strictly to a working principle, which he prefers to having a pre-conceived idea of what the final work should look like. The found materials will be organised according to a set of rules based on traditional Chinese ink wash painting, where there are, for example, specific rules for the order in which individual branches are painted, which then make up the actual shape of a tree.
For Liang Shuo, processes of linking and overlapping play a critical role. This is also reflected in the exhibition´s title, which links words to each other that only appear to make sense. What is crucial for the artist, however, is that the end of one word coincides with the beginning of the next. It would have been more difficult to read but the exhibition could also have been called distantamountain, a newly coined poetic word.
In his exhibitions, not only does Liang Shuo combine that which already exists but the artist also achieves to create new poetic realities from that which he has found. These are rooted in old traditions but connect with the global reality of today as well.
Liang Shuo (*1976 in Tianjin in northern China) is a Beijing-based artist. He studied Sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Bejing and graduated in 2000. In addition to a large number of solo exhibitions in China, his works have been displayed internationally in numerous group exhibitions.