【Review】Wu Shan：Drifting (2025)

A solo exhibition by Wu Shan at Shenzhen‘s Ginkgo Space featured the Hangzhou-based artist’s latest creations. His works belong to modern abstract art, but are heavily influenced by two ancient Chinese traditions - lacquer painting and kunqu.

Wu Shan’s visual language is, in fact, a combination of two languages: the language of line and the language of colour. It gives the impression that the artist is trying to strip the work of its noise and anger in pursuit of a profound calm and pure rhythm, a style that can be understood as the ability to see the world in a complex but harmonious way, as if it were an exquisite musical composition.

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière, speaking of modernist art, introduced the concept of the ‘aesthetic regime’ as a counterpoint to the ‘reproduction-imitation mode’. The aesthetic regime allows one to go beyond a single storyline to reveal what Rancière called the ‘silent language of the world’, the sensual fabric of the world. It seems that Wu Shan is on a similar quest. His silent world language (or in his works, more like a silent chord) is a labyrinth of intertwined lines, with branching trajectories reflecting light at the corners, flickering like fish scales.

The conceptualisation of abstract painting, like the conceptualisation of music, can only reach a certain level and moment. Eventually, there is always a crevice found between the language and the object, the idea and the image, the viewer and the painting. In this crevice, there seems to be the drift of the world, the reflection of lacquer, the lightness of illusion that does not yet fully exist.