"I am not painting self-portraits or depicting any specific, real person. They seem like characters from modern myths, stuck halfway through their stories: missions incomplete, no longer believing in an ending. They often lower their heads, avoid, and remain silent, as if trapped in some echo within their emotions and bodies. They don't want to 'become strong'; they just want to hold on or simply exist."
— ZHANG Shangfeng
BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition of ZHANG Shangfeng, The Discourse of Neo-Mythmaking, from May 17 to June 15, 2025. The exhibition focuses on ZHANG's recent painting works, curated by YANG Xi, showcasing how he constructs a contemporary "modern myth" through a narrative image language that bridges reality and fiction.
The title The Discourse of Neo-Mythmaking highlights the artist's stance and strategy in image-making. The "characters" in his works are no longer epic heroes but rather "ordinary people" situated in the cracks of life and time. ZHANG transforms the overlooked, plotless struggles of reality—the time and energy consumed by internal conflicts—into the emotional foundation of his creation. When real-life scenarios are recontextualized within the visual frameworks ZHANG creates, we witness how an artist translates the "self" into an estranged "other" and how images become a medium for the rhetoric of modern myths.
In the exhibition, recurring figures are repeatedly erased, distorted, and transformed. As one's gaze slowly traverses the continuous frames, an unstable and ambiguous visual rhetoric gradually takes shape. The combination of acrylic and oil paints imbues the images with a fractured, penetrating, and adhesive temporal texture, evoking a "sense of stasis" between completion and incompletion. This points to the speechlessness, stagnation, loneliness, and uncertainty inherent in the "modern myths" described by ZHANG Shangfeng.
Therefore, The Discourse of Neo-Mythmaking neither demystifies nor re-enchants reality but chooses a different path altogether. ZHANG Shangfeng's images abandon evasive emotions, and within the characters he portrays, we quietly discover that his painting language transcends the "concrete" form. By articulating the ineffable "mundane reality," he occupies the visual space, creating an "invisible" dimension that offers viewers an embodied experience. This becomes a sensitive zone we are compelled to confront.
