 n 20th June 2009, at 5pm, the exhibition “Image Dialectic: The Art of Shu Qun” will be held at the OCAT Overseas Chinese Town, Nanshan District in Shenzhen, China. This exhibition is organized by the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal of He Xiangning Art Museum (OCAT) and sponsored by China Minsheng Banking Corp., LTD. The curator for this exhibition is Mr Huang Zhuan.
The exhibition “Image Dialectic: The Art of Shu Qun” is comprised of three sections, “Absolute Principles”, “Out of the Sublime” and “The Symbolic Order”, which will give a comprehensive presentation of the historical path and rationale of Shu Qun’s art. The exhibition will include nearly 50 representative works from Shu Qun’s three phases. This is both a case study on Shu Qun’s art and an academic revision of the history of contemporary art thinking in China since the 1980s.
Shu Qun was one of the main organizers of the new art wave movement “Northern art community” in the 1980s, he was also one of the earliest initiator and practitioner of the mainstream art ideological trend of “rational painting”. From his point of view, the root of all difficult  questions of art is philosophical, and if a perception of art is not able to withstand logical thinking, it has no right to become a cultural problem. Up till now, an unusual three stage image dialectic is able to be deducted from his art experience, thus he is worthy to be called a Chinese metaphysical artist.
In the “absolute principles” period (1983 – 1989), the search for a universal key to Chinese culture serves as the central topic of artistic thinking. The Platonic/Hegelian metaphysical model, Nietzsche’s superman philosophy, Rousseau’s revision of political authority and the existentialism of Jaspers and Heidegger came together to form the romanticist cultural manifesto known as the “Northern Frigid Zone Civilization”(Beifang Handai Wenming); the plastic concepts of medieval churches, the “metaphysical painting” of Géricault, and Mondrian’s “neo-plasticism” gave birth to the abstract and cold visual forms of “rational painting” seen in works such as Endless Road, Absolute Principles and Wading Towards the Opposite Shore. Since this theory of painting fits the criteria of the 1980s enlightenment, it became, thanks to critical interpretation, a mainstream school of thought during the 85 New Wave movement. According to the artist, “rational painting” completed the shift in Chinese painting from “mood composition” to “manner composition”.
The roughly decade-long “out of the sublime” period (1990-2004) marked the antithetical phase in Shu Qun’s “rationalist” art career. He calls it the “fall of the sacred”. The retreat of the Chinese modern art movement in the 1990s and the conundrum faced by classical humanism in the new cultural setting (mainly the postmodern deconstruction trend and consumer culture) sent Shu Qun into a phase of revision on his “rationalism”. Readings into logical positivism linguistic analytical philosophy, critical rationalism and even deconstructionism led to massive changes in his thinking. The theoretical and political significance of criticisms of traditional humanism by analytical philosophy and  the philosophy of science led him to focus on the connections between discourse and discursive circumstances. In his words, he moved from being an existentialist to being a positivist and then a structuralist. This change in thinking was embodied in his art through the emergence of analytical, even pop linguistic composition. Works such as The Dispersal of Absolute Principals, Voices of Identity – Order of Religious Discourse, Voices of Identity – Post-Vanguard Doctrine, Four Basic Operations, Cultural Pop Cui Jian and World Art Anthology implied “a shift from the ideologically embellished Absolute Principles to the wholly unembellished Voices of Identity”, but all of these changes did not change his “rationalist” leanings or macroscopic mode of thinking; the main phase of his “absolute principles” thinking came to a close with the demonstrative performance of “a tribute to the sublime” in 1994. He calls this period one of transition from “mood composition” to “vocal composition”, a shift from cultural criticism to linguistic criticism.
In the nearly eight years that followed, he even gave up on painting, taking part instead in the design and operation of private museums. His theoretical reading also expanded from philosophy into management and design history. This lasted until 2002, when the “impulse to return to original experience” and an interest in the archaeology of thought led him to create somewhat expressionist works such as Monotone Workers Peasants and Soldiers, and Red Mao Zedong, and it was this antithetical process that completed the shift in Shu Qun’s artistic thinking from ontology and epistemology to linguistics.
Beginning in 2005, thoughts about consumer culture marked by the “symbolic order” gave Shu Qun’s art a reason to return to the  metaphysical path, and brought his art into the “symbolic order” period (2005 – 2008), where he engaged in a rethinking of the value of “rationalism”in forming a critique of reality. Works from this period, such as The Symbolic Order, were in terms of image form, a replication of the “absolute principles” period, but the issue it was directed at changed from the construction of an abstract cultural model to specific “social criticism”, which made for a suitable synthesis of Shu Qun’s “rational painting”: a rethinking of the historical pitfalls of Chinese modernization and the rational countermeasures required in facing these pitfalls. Of course, just as in the first phase, the logic created in Shu Qun’s art during the “symbolic order” period was clearly marked by characteristics of “image utopianism”.
Editorial Note: The exhibition will be held from 20th June till 20th August, the significance of metaphysical thinking regarding Chinese contemporary art as well as art history and the communication of intellectual history will be displayed. A workshop on the theme of “Are metaphysical methods of inquiry still relevant to the discussion of conceptual blind spots?” hosted by Lu Peng will also be held during the exhibition period.
The OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT) is a subdivision of the He Xiangning Art Museum. Officially established on January 28, 2005, OCAT is China's only non-profit contemporary Chinese art organization connected to a national art museum. While OCAT is named after the Overseas Chinese Town in which it is located, it also has exhibition spaces in Beijing and Shanghai.For more information, please visit:www.ocat.com.cn , Tel: 86 0755 2691 5100
Below is part of the images by the artist:
Wading Towards the Opposite Shore No.1, Sketch on Paper, 39×30cm, 1987
Four Basic Operations No.2, Oil on Canvas, 130×114cm, 1990
Four Basic Operations No.3, Oil on Canvas, 130×114cm, 1990
Four Basic Operations No.4, Oil on Canvas, 130×114cm, 1990
Voices of Identity – Order of Religious Discourse No.9, Oil on Canvas, 200×170cm, 1992
Endless Road No.1, Oil on Canvas, 80×200 cm,1983
Endless Road No.2, Oil on Canvas, 100×120 cm, 1983
Absolute Principles No.1, Oil on Canvas, 200×160cm, 1984
Absolute Principles No.3, Oil on Canvas, 195×200cm, 1986
Absolute Principles No.4, Oil on Canvas
Absolute Principles No.6, Oil on Canvas
Absolute Principles No.7, Oil on Canvas
Absolute Principles No.8, Oil on Canvas
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