Shan Yuhan: The Hesitator Who Looks up and down, from Heaven to Earth
By/ Evonne Jiawei Yuan
As an up-and-coming artist who has recently begun to emerge in the figurative field, Shan Yuhan possesses a certain sense of history that distinguishes him from many young peers. This kind of awareness has been present throughout his easel practice since early on and is somewhat related to his native experience of the homeland and its unique geographies accommodating his family of origin, and indirectly determined by the formal training in plastic arts and the methodologies of realism that he received in later years.
Nonetheless, what really prompted Shan to develop his own iconic language was the subtle, ineffable emotions and thoughts that had long been haunting his mind, which gradually transformed into the status of ‘hesitation’ coined by the painting subject in his individual path: firstly, it responds to the compositional paradigm, as a mapping of the ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’ in the external world, along with and the alternation between the two extremes; secondly, it acts on the arrangement of a group of characters, which constantly urges the “others” – the artist himself, who is occasionally absent from the act of painting, yet still seems to be ordained as an individual incarnated in the era, as well as any viewer else, who consciously focuses on his works for embodied imaginations – to inform the identities of their own and collective identities in various social relations and specific situations.
Shan was born in 1998 in Daqing, the place once known as the ‘eldest son of the Republic’. In the same year, along with the happening of China Railway Speed Up Campaign in its second round, a coal mine gas explosion occurred in Hegang, the small town on the other side of Heilongjiang, and the Yangtze River Basin suffered from the continuing effects of poor-quality construction work exposed by the massive floods. If the post-reform-and-opening-up recession of Northeast China and the ensuing Northeast phenomenon are attributed to the autonomy of the political order, many painters of the previous generation usually chose to resort to the iconoclasm of fatherhood, which used to be the implication of rules and isolations, and to a certain degree of scarification. However, instead of being concentrated upon the collapse of patriarchal authority or the intergenerational dissonance over fatherhood, Shan feels unconcerned with the political order and rather attempts to emphasize the causal forces, as well as the general crisis that engulfs the entire world.
Of all the works that Shan has completed so far, the most autobiographical one is not any portrait but a landscape in the title of Spring (2023), which seems to be the most abstract and simple. The painterly violence highlighted by the powerful brushstrokes extends to the fluid juxtaposition of murky browns and deep blues, while the rough slashes set off by whites carved into the ground fully represent the melting snow in the warming season. The twists and turns between the lines and surfaces give the whole image a subtle sense of quivering, fluttering, and trembling against the suspended horizon. The artist thus creates a metaphor in which hope and fear coexist. By manifesting the ‘sublimity’ of natural objects, he hints at the frustration and destruction inflicted by the ‘sublimity’ of the societal mechanism.
This kind of contradiction and struggle enveloped the old industrial neighbourhoods in transition by the end of the last century, especially those ‘company towns’, taking the oil city of Daqing as an example, which not only constituted the background colour of Shan’s memories of growing up but also connected countless individual lives in similar conditions to each other. In her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West(2002), American scholar of philosophy, literature, and intellectual history Susan Buck-Morss pointed out that the construction of mass utopias was the dream of the twentieth century, which in itself was an applied force altering the laws of nature and imbued everything around it with collective, political desires. As the millennium approached, the belief that (industrial) modernisation could overcome any kind of scarcity and shape a progressive civilisation was challenged by the disintegration of European socialism, the restructuring of the capitalist system and more ecological constraints. Ideal models designed and carefully forged by technocrats have given way to individual happiness and cynicism.1
Failed desires may degenerate the subject back into children’s mode as nostalgia for paternal culture. Shan understands that the combination of an indifferent, numb, slightly teasing spectator mentality with an almost sincere childishness – implying a chemical reaction between sentimental romanticism and cynicism – is an excellent footnote to the micro-histories in which he has engaged. In this vein, he establishes a certain ‘persona’ for his first solo gallery show. The coldness and grimness of the far north have become a pervasive climate in the artist’s recent work, suggesting the dissolution of grand narratives. Taking Winter Vision (2023) as an example, the mental state of a young figure who stands in the snowstorm is in itself and in fact very complex – unprepared though, but still fearless.
Memory-Mask (2023) is the only work in the exhibition that Shan recognises as a self-portrait: on the one hand, the dark and deep jungle unleashes a strange and twisting momentum, and the young man can only choose to go with the flow in its embrace, or else he will be swept away by the gigantic waves. There seems to be a choice in front of him, but in fact, there is no way to choose, which exactly confuses the man in his teenage. On the other hand, the mask on top of the man’s head is in the shape of a classic symbol ‘Mickey’ produced by Disney, another popular utopia from a ‘hostile’ world for ‘leisure’ rather than ‘labour’. Consciously or unconsciously, the artist alludes to the growth of consumerism and the pervasiveness of global ideologies, but the Rembrandtian arrangement of light and shadow makes the young man’s facial expressions uncertain, and he is not satisfied with the novelty of the quest.
German philosopher Karl Jaspers predicted nearly a century ago that consumption, as a technical order of living, is a social machine that joins the majority of the population into a ‘mass man’. They are dominated by the fictitious quality. But pleasure is not necessarily their true purpose.2 The young men depicted in Fleeting and Suspension (2024) share a similar melancholy and hesitancy as they attempt to steer and turn in the cramped space: the former subjected to an environment that simulates weightlessness struggling to control his body and the weapons he holds, the latter keenly capturing with the brush the fleeting moments when the light of day is left behind. Another contrast of this kind in the exhibition is between Free Bird and Cabin (2024): both are backdrops but express the opposite themes of leaving home and returning home.
A key work that echoes this transition from the meticulous positioning of a single character to the emergence of a group of figures is The Hesitator (2024). The startling glimpse of the naked protagonist in a marching procession. By invoking the image of the fool, a barren but not necessarily demoralised figure from medieval Western religion who later frequents secular scenes, Shan reminds us of Agamben’s term for the state of exception/emergency and echoes the image of ‘bare life’ that is expelled due to the loss of political meaning, such as the loss of political significance or the cessation of sovereignty mechanisms.3
At the same time, in his larger-scale work Apocalypse (2024), he further restores the psychological archetype of the fool, providing a reference to the common human (historical) experience behind ‘bare life’. The artist draws on the work of Paul Gauguin in one of his masterpieces, Where Did We Come From? Who are we? Where are we going? (1897–98), especially the juxtaposition of the vibrant baby and the dying old man, shows us a conflict that belongs to the modern individual in particular. The dilemma of inescapability, the kinks and twists of self-crisis, and the urgency and reincarnation of old and new life. Shan also traced such conflict in local literature, and Bard (2023) pays homage to Shi Tiesheng’s long lyrical essay I and the Temple of Earth. The suona, as a symbol of Chinese human affairs, including weddings and funerals, blossoms like a flower’s bones as the protagonist plays it to his heart’s content, gradually spreading into an all-encompassing matriarchal cavity.
The complicity between memory and history is also evident in Shan’s making of disasterous scenes. Whether in the three-part composition of The Cave Gameor the golden-ratio horizon of Not a Burning House(2023), the true subject of the image is the mushroom cloud that occupies the foreground after a violent explosion or fire. In this way, Shan symbolises the imbalanced ecological and climatic crises caused by extreme technologisation and progressivism, as well as the ever-present threat of war. Finally, in Mass Man and the Nameless (2024), he relies on the religious allusion of ‘Exodus’ (Out of Egypt) to draw a picture of a group of spiritual exiles who have broken free from the shackles of rationality. They show a state of existence that transcends specific identities, concepts or definitions, pursuing mystical experiences, expressing their lyrical selves and gaining complete freedom in the midst of migrating space and passing time. This may be the real heroism in the artist’s mind.
References:
1. Susan Buck-Morss. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 2002.
2. Karl Jaspers. Man in the Modern Age. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1951.
3. Giorgio Agamben. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1998.
