In the works featured in the exhibition Shang Yang’s Art in Suzhou, Shang Yang has discarded his past painting conventions: the frame, the canvas, paint and the painted forms that arise from them. Now, he has employed new materials to engage in creation. These creations are not so much paintings as productions: some are created through burning, some are created through affixation, some are altered through casting. Shang Yang has employed many new mediums and materials as elements in his works. Though they appear as paintings in their final form (the works are completed in a flat frame), they are far from paintings—they are not made with brushes on canvas. These works, however, are not installations in the conventional sense, either. He is producing artworks based on the unique forms of these materials. He does not remove the sense of image. To the contrary, the desire for form continually emerges within the artworks, and in this way, these artworks have not completely discarded the expressive intent of painting. In one artwork with an asphalt background, the asphalt appears as a black paint, a bamboo shaft appears as a straight line in the image, and the bamboo leaves are like a series of color fields. The entire piece of bamboo appears to have been painted against a black background. This combination of different materials fits with the formal desire of painting. Meanwhile, the iron which appears in many of these works, various forms of curved, straight and grid-shaped pieces of iron, appear like abstract lines and boxes due to the unique form and lines of the material. That is to say, the artist is making these artworks out of the properties and forms of these materials. He has chosen all kinds of materials, including asphalt, bamboo, scroll paper, cloth, various types of iron pieces and iron frames, putty and glue, and has combined them in different ways in different artworks, yet all of them appear to be paintings.
　　In this sense, Shang Yang’s artworks are neither installations nor paintings, or, one could say the opposite, that they are both installations and paintings. It is the production of installations through painting, or the production of paintings through installation. They stand somewhere between the two. Let us get a little more specific: these artworks are collections of materials, and are full of visible materiality. In painting, the artwork aims to remove materiality to the greatest extent in order to capture the form and become an image about the world. Painting does not gather materials together but recreates and conveys materials. In installation art, the artwork is a pure material, a thing-in-itself with visible space. Its aim is to reveal its materiality, rather than recreate forms from the external world. Shang Yang’s works, however, possess the traits of the recreated image as well as the autonomous traits of the material. These works emphasize materiality, but they do not close themselves off in the illusion of material autonomy. Likewise, they produce images, but do not submit to the hegemony of the recreated image. These artworks are open to both image and material, and are simultaneously paintings and installations. For this reason, those square iron frames have retained the material nature of iron while also retaining a re-creative frame image. Likewise, the curved rusty iron, while retaining its stiff and sturdy iron material properties, also comes to form elegantly curved lines. There is no inherent mutual exclusion between the material properties of the thing and the forms it recreates. Here, the thing has a dual function: to preserve its material properties while also gaining formal re-creation.
　　In this way, these artworks have used the shapes of things to produce forms—whether it is a concrete form or an abstract form—and have used the material properties of these things to produce artworks. Actually, why did Shang Yang choose these things as the elements in his artworks? On the one hand, you have scroll paper, bamboo and cloth, and on the other you have iron, asphalt and putty. It is clear that these represent two very different types of materials, almost dualistically opposed types of materials: one is soft while the other is hard; one is vegetal while the other is mineral; one is agricultural while the other is industrial; one is ancient while the other is new. These dually opposed things, these things with almost no common properties, have been strangely combined together to create an artwork. They gather together in an artwork and thus gain a common relationship: they exist together in the artwork, in the exhibition, and if we consider that this is an exhibition within space, then they exist together in space, in a single city, and finally, they will exist together in history.
　　What does this coexistence of utterly different materials imply? In fact, it is within these connections of coexistence, within this stark oppositional contrast that the unique characteristics of the materials is catalyzed. Here, the meaning of a thing is only produced when it is connected to another thing. Only when it is connected to iron do people think about the softness, sheen and elegance of a piece of silk, the ancient silkworm technology behind it and the soft shadows of human history cast by this technology, a deliberate, handcrafted way of life. On the other hand, it is in the contrast with silk that people realize the rigid, emotionless principles of iron in its massive intrusion into modern society and urbanization. Likewise, they also recognize the cold, brutal and rapid lifestyle it represents. Here, the juxtaposition of two different things in a single artwork does not imply harmony so much as it implies discord. Though the artist has combined bamboo and asphalt into a single painting, the absurdity of this combination is obvious: bamboo could never grow in asphalt. The verdant bamboo has been soiled and rendered lifeless by the heavy black backdrop. Likewise, a fine and gentle bolt of silk satirically wraps a chunk of sharp rusty iron. Is it protecting this arbitrary mass of iron or confining it? Is it softly wrapping the iron or striving to contain it? Regardless, that rusty iron can easily harm it, break it, pierce it. Even when wrapped in many layers of silk, the rusty iron towers over it.
　　It would appear that Shang Yang’s new works are an allegorical form of the times. His method of forcing these things together emphasizes the struggles between them. The struggles of these things are undoubtedly the struggles of our time: the struggle between new and old, the struggle between agricultural civilization and industrial civilization, the struggle between the countryside and the city, the struggle between protection and development—all of these are encapsulated in the struggle between the garden and the pavement. This struggle is the struggle of modernity. Shang Yang perceives this in a powerful way, and he cannot shake it: the modernity that swept away the old times like a cyclone has catalyzed his nostalgia. Now, in the modern metropolis of Suzhou, he wishes to express the old face of this historic city, the Suzhou filled with silk and landscaped gardens. Suzhou has rapidly developed into a model metropolis of modernity, but in the same way, if it does not check its growth into a freak of development, it will one day become a city of ruins.