55

Wang Shu Zhong’s individual exhibition ”Unfinished Landscape" opens on the 17th of October 2026, featuring his recently completed mixed-media works on silk and canvas. The exhibition is scheduled to conclude on the 7th of November. This marks Wang Shu Zhong’s second solo show at 55, following “The Folds of Perception” last year.

Landscape has been the longest-standing cultural motif in Chinese art. Through generations, panoramic landscape scrolls have constructed an idealized nature - habitable, traversable, and self-contained - where mountains and rivers stretch endlessly, their energy flowing seamlessly, becoming poetic vessels through which Eastern people perceive the world and settle their spirits. In contemporary contexts, however, our understanding of traditional landscapes has long moved beyond actual topographical scenes, dissolving into scattered fragments and fading echoes within cultural memory.

This exhibition centers on right works created with mixed media, moving beyond conventional realistic depictions and ink-brush conventions of classical landscape painting. Taking fragmentation, erasure, dissolution, and continuity as its core themes, it reconstructs a new visual language and spiritual essence for contemporary landscape. The series establishes a binary dialogue between square-format panels and ultra-long horizontal handscrolls, unfolding a visual progression and emotional journey from "fragmented rocks" to an "abstract river."

The square canvases resemble extracted sections of mountain scenery, built upon wrinkled textures and layered with charcoal smudges, spontaneous writing, splatters of paint, and overlapping layers. These techniques dismantle the classical landscape’s structured, harmonious forms. Rocks appear broken and hazy, reality and illusion interwoven; ambiguous symbolic lines and careless scribbles replace refined brushwork. No longer replicating concrete natural vistas, these works preserve the tangible traces of memory collisions and mental revisions, capturing fragmented, blurred impressions of landscape.

As these scattered fragments extend and connect, they form two exceptionally long horizontal scrolls. The first integrates remnants of mountains, symbols, and faint human silhouettes, linking broken landscape elements into a continuous flow. It revives the traditional scroll-viewing experience—progressive shifts in perspective, frame-by-frame wandering—yet infuses it with contemporary graffiti-like markings and fluid paint textures, giving ancient handscrolls a fresh modern sensibility. The second scroll completely abandons literal rock forms, instead using horizontal bands of color and naturally cascading streaks to abstractly translate the endless rhythm of rivers and streams. Here, once-static mountains dissolve into the flow of time and water.

Rooted in the essence of Eastern landscape aesthetics, this body of work merges the logic of contemporary abstract expressionism with artistic languages drawn from trace-based painting and memory landscapes. Rejecting replication of natural scenes or pursuit of perfect scenic ideals, it embraces damaged, incomplete, loose, and improvisational imagery to reflect the contemporary condition toward traditional culture: familiar yet indistinct, whole yet fractured, yearned-for yet distant.

What is "residual" is not truly broken—it is a reconfiguration through the lens of our times. These wrinkled textures, erased marks, flowing colors, and shattered mountains represent the rebirth of classical landscape in the present era. With mixed media as his brush and memory as his subject, the artist navigates the tension between fragment and continuity, figure and abstraction, tradition and modernity, composing a poetic landscape that belongs to this age.

Wang Shuzhong was born in Lingbi, Anhui province, China in 1987. He graduated from the Art Institute, Shanghai University with a M.F.A. in Art History in 2012. He won John Moor Painting Award in the category of Contemporary Chinese Ink & Colour in 2025.

Starting from ink and wash, Wang Shuzhong dissects its traditional grammar and releases its potential as a tool for spatial perception. Amid the delicate tension between paper and ink, he no longer depicts landscapes but evokes the flow of qi and the generation of space. His paintings are like cross-sectional diagrams of QI fields - immeasurable, unreplicable, and temporary perceptual compositions. In his practice, emptiness is both the blank space in form and the openness of perception. He integrates abstract expression with Eastern spatial philosophy to construct a non-linear, non-solid visual system: lines trace the trajectory of QI, color layers weave rhythms, and blank spaces serve as mediators. He rejects image-based representation and instead captures and translates relationships. Technology in his works is not an addition but an invisible social perception. His paintings are like the weaving of the body against algorithmic logic, attempting to reshape human perception of the hidden dimensions. Here, emptiness is not negation but a form of emergent existence, a folding of time, and an indeterminate state of perception.