SHEN LING

Curator’s Words

Shen Ling’s Void Flower portrays her many self-reflections over the past years and her feelings about the passage of time. It’s like the mirror image of everyday life. As a kind of compensation for the short blooming days, Void Flower refers to the mundane everyday life, which is mostly languid leisure and melancholy. The ‘Yearly Portrait’ is a metaphor for the weight of time, and the images inside it may continually shuttle and leap in the exhibition space, emphasising the connection between her works and serving as a retrospective of her career.

​Over the past years, Shen Ling has been taming her inner chaos, slowing down her pace, and developing inner awareness. She travelled between the real and art worlds, eliminating the redundancy to express her unique style amid ambiguity. In addition, she even gradually erased the traces of her previous creations to get rid of all kinds of unease brought by reality. Fortunately, with painting, she can endure the tedious days, get rid of the clutter, and catch the precious pieces of life that have nowhere to hide.

Perhaps, for Shen Ling, painting and living by heart is true freedom and the greatest decency. Everything else is collateral and dispensable.

^{– Feng Boyi}