SHI YANLIANG X SUN YU: CORPOREAL MUSINGS
TANG CONTEMPORARY ART is pleased to present Corporeal Musings, a dual exhibition by Shi Yanliang and Sun Yu.
December 20, 2025 - January 24, 2026
Two artists, Shi Yanliang and Sun Yu, approach the body respectively from the stretch marks of social structure and the mechanism of painterly production, making it into a space of appearance, disappearance, and re-construction.
To a certain degree, Shi’s work can be interpreted as the imagery precipitation of societal structure. The pictorial body suspends into a state of half-symbol and half-metaphor. A relationship of distortion and suspension constantly emerges in-between human and object, animal and narrative. Through a highly sensitive gaze of reality, Shi puts body into the spiritual landscape of China’s societal metamorphosis.
Through the compounded relationship among symbols, fables, and structural omission, he puts pictorial images in a compressed space. The relationship among light, background, and subject is distant as well as tense, presenting a static tension.
Different from Shi’s gaze of societal reality, Sun’s artistic creativity originates from the interior logic of painting. He does not anticipate the pictorial image but paints freely on the canvas, waiting for the image to emerge from ambiguity, therefore giving visualization to emotions and memories. This creative method of “body before mind” itself is already a bodily presence.
In works like Beauty’s Peak, Small Waist, and Tactical Contraction, bodily parts are condensed into visual and emotional formal symbols. The canvas is no longer the medium of paint but more so the “container of mind”, holding within itself the unspoken experiences hidden beneath one’s consciousness.
The two artists together put the body as the theatre of metaphor. While Shi Yanliang presents the situation of the body amid societal metamorphosis through concrete symbolism and narrative omission, Sun Yu unveils the body’s deeper structure in memory and emotion. Their works also make an interesting contrast: a double gaze towards the corporeal “external world” and “internal structure”.