SHANG YIXIN

Beijing Commune is proud to announce the exhibition of Shang Yixin opening on November 19^th, 2013. The show is young artist Shang Yixin’s first solo exhibition at Beijing Commune. The exhibition will continue until January 4^th, 2014.

Since 2008, Shang Yixin has searched for a new medium to express his thinking. From 2008 to 2011, Shang created a series of light installations on the mutually constraining relationship between light source, object, and shadow. This group of artworks directly influenced Shang’s work on canvas. He has reduced the elements on the canvas down to the most simple–the square. In 2011, Shang chose the square as the sole element in his creative practice. In his works, squares have been reduplicated into a matrix. Their interconnections form a structure, a totalising organistion. Each work is the result of multiple layers of overlayed square matrices. As Shang says, ‘I control each square matrix in both the opacity and saturation I desire. Each layer’s overlay, the square matrix altered--enlarged, shrunk, shifted, comprising a half-translucent overlay--according to certain rules, disrupts the order produced and established by the previous layer while also building a new order. The form of the square matrices gradually becomes hazy and dissolves within the picture plane, becoming indeterminable. What emerges and replaces it is the ‘trajectory’ of this change, which gradually becomes stronger and more prominent. Each action enacted upon the square matrices influences the form of this ‘trajectory’ and is subsumed within it.’

In his 2013 works, Shang makes these experiments more precise and emphasizes the intensity of the artwork. The result is a static tension that is produced within the structure of the arrangements, a dialectic of stillness and movement. This ‘tension’ is brought about by various orders, rules, and rhythms. In 1013-4-2500, 13945-90-2500, and other works in the exhibition, squares are tightly arranged on the canvas. The artist hopes that through the juxtaposition and interconnection of these elements, he might incorporate his original reflections on visual logic into a broader mode of thinking that is meaningless yet contains an accumulation of operations.