Exhibition Period
12th July 2025 – 17th August 2025
Venue
SGA Three on the Bund, 3F, No.3 Zhong Shan Dong Yi Road, Shanghai
Artists
Feng Zhixuan, Guo Donglai, Liu Chao, Wang Xin, Yang Shen, Ying Xinxun, Zhao Bo, Zhang Haijun
Academic Host
Wang Kaimei
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This July, Hushen Art Museum is pleased to announce its exhibition titled "Under the Sun". This exhibition brings together eight contemporary artists Feng Zhixuan, Guo Donglai, Liu Chao, Yang Shen, Ying Xinxun, Zhao Bo, Zhang Haijun. The exhibition will be on view from July 12 to August 17, 2025.
The Sun Rises in the East and Shines upon My Pavilion by the Fusang Tree. In the height of summer, under the scorching sky, the sun reigns supreme — its brilliance breathing life into all things on Earth, its presence announcing an undeniable dominion over the natural world. Yet, when placed against the vast scale of the cosmos, this eternal star that has inspired countless hymns of human civilization is but a speck of dust in the Milky Way, a fleeting spark in the universe. It is difficult, if not impossible, for human beings to fully grasp or imagine the deep-time narratives of Earth, the solar system, and the cosmos within the limits of a single lifetime. As the only known intelligent life within this expanse, when we look up at the sky, we experience a resonance between grandeur and insignificance — a simultaneous awe and humility. It is in this intricate entanglement between the creator of life on Earth and its sentient inhabitants that the human story under the sun begins to unfold.
This exhibition, using the "sun" as a visual metaphor, invites us on a journey of exploration through the works of eight contemporary Chinese artists. Together, they imagine new narrative possibilities of life under the sun. Zhao Bo’s Cruel Wonderland immerses viewers in a haunting primeval forest—does it depict a pre-human Earth or a post-civilizational future? These ancient landscapes, transformed over millions of years into fossil fuels, have powered human industrial progress. Yet in the face of climate change and planetary warming, does this "wonderland" now offer only a "cruel" mirror reflecting the depletion of natural resources in the Anthropocene? In contrast, Guo Donglai’s practice offers a measure of solace. The artist reassembles found objects from nature—trees, stones—on canvas to construct a new harmony between the organic and the artificial. His work disrupts the binary of visible and invisible, of presence and absence, as he engages with a philosophical question that echoes from ancient times to today: if a tree falls in a forest with no one around, does it make a sound? His art probes the possibility of coexistence between humanity and the natural world.
In Wang Xin’s paintings, abstracted green foliage resembles the skin of the Earth, where photosynthesis ignites new possibilities of life. Her canvases trace the sedimented memory of bodies rooted in the land, evolving into a personal geology. In stark contrast, Feng Zhixuan’s Wishing Pool detaches from the laws of photosynthesis. This microcosmic stage—molded from ancient ritual and futuristic technology—plays out under the glaring spotlight of the adage “there is nothing new under the sun.” The artist’s imagination becomes a conduit between Marco Polo’s medieval voyages and interstellar sci-fi odysseys, revealing narratives hidden within the ruins of collapsed civilizations. Yang Shen's protagonists are fictional explorers: colonial-era plant collectors and animal hunters caught under the tropical sun. His vividly colored landscapes, reminiscent of W. Somerset Maugham’s literary gaze on the tropics, evoke the thin veneer of so-called civilization, peeling away to expose something more primal, where moral clarity dissolves in the glare.
As Earth orbits the sun, it brings forth the rhythm of seasons and the passage of time. On this one-way journey with no return, time is the imprint of human engagement with the world. Liu Chao’s Old Boxer triptych captures cinematic fragments of time: an aging man with boxing gloves stands before blocks of color, waiting for the next round. The solitary boxer, like Munch's late self-portraits caught between clocks and beds, embodies humanity’s struggle against time—an eventual surrender to decay and death, yet also a quest for transcendence through reflection, poetry, and art. In Ying Xinxun’s work, an angel's wing balanced precariously on a cactus encapsulates both nobility and absurdity, the sacred suspended between earth and sky. In Zhang Haijun’s visual labyrinths, composed of color fields and shifting lines, painting itself becomes a process of transformation—fracturing, folding, and spiraling—steadily ascending toward a spiritual and poetic summit.
Human beings strive for material sustenance and spiritual elevation through labor and contemplation. On this path of inquiry and self-discovery, imagination, artistic creation, scientific skepticism, and philosophical reflection converge to ignite the light of civilization. Art, in its formal expression, gives shape to this deeply human pursuit of understanding and aesthetic desire. This exhibition stands as a modest offering to these grand, enduring themes.
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About the Artists
Feng Zhixuan（1993, Zhejiang, China)
Graduated from the Department of Public Art at the China Academy of Art in 2015 and the Sculpture Department of the Royal College of Art in the UK in 2018, Feng Zhixuan specializes in large-scale, site-specific sculptural installations. His works often take the form of barriers, monuments, scientific apparatuses, or defensive fortifications—architectural presences that embody both mass and tension. Within states of disorder and transformation, Feng captures moments of balance. Through a poetic rearticulation of technology, his practice explores impermanence in a renewed visual vocabulary, ultimately returning to one of the most fundamental questions within the Chinese philosophical context: What is nature?
Guo Donglai (1985, Beijing, China)
He holds master's degrees from the Department of Stage Design at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts and the Department of Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy. He currently lives and works in Beijing. His works are included in both public and private collections, including the CopeIouzos Family Art Museum in Greece, OCT Art & Design Gallery, Era Art Museum, Wang Shikuo Foundation, and Zhihe Fashion Group in Shanghai.
Liu Chao (1987, Hebei, China)
He received his bachelor's degree in Oil Painting from Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in 2010, and his master's degree from the same institution in 2016. He currently lives and works in Shenyang, where he also teaches at the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts. His practice constructs a personal logic of painting on the canvas, where traces of urgency, joy, determination, impulse, restlessness, frustration, hesitation, endurance, and renewal are inscribed through time. His work unfolds as a field of thought, where the act of painting becomes a visible trajectory of his inner landscape.
Wang Xin (1985, Guangxi, China)
She graduated from the School of Fine Arts at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), earning both a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Fine Arts. She currently lives and works between Beijing and Sydney. Wang Xin’s artistic practice centers on large-scale oil and mixed media paintings, incorporating unique monoprint silkscreen techniques and ground mineral pigments. Her work investigates the relationship between the external structures and internal cavities of both the natural world and the human body, initiating an exploration of the "in-between states" of the universe.
Yang Shen (1973, Beijing, China)
He graduated from the Department of Mural Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1996 and currently lives and works in Beijing. Yang Shen's recent work centers on the relationship between humans and nature, humans and animals, and the history of colonialism. Through the fictional narrative of a Western explorer journeying through the jungles of Asia, the artist seeks to reveal the captivating—and at times ambiguous—moments within the human relationship with the natural world.
Ying Xinxun (1981, Zhejiang, China)
She received her doctoral degree from the China Academy of Art in 2019. Ying Xinxun’s artistic practice takes everyday life as its point of departure, excavating the “social texture” of materials and objects. She employs material not only as a medium but as a grammar of creation, treating technique itself as a form of materiality. By investigating "objects in process," her work articulates contemporary social phenomena through the evolving states of matter and making.
Zhao Bo (1984, Liaoning, China)
He graduated from the Department of Oil Painting at Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, earning his Bachelor of Arts in 2007 and Master of Arts in 2011. During his studies, he participated in an exchange program at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway. He currently lives and works in Shenyang. Zhao Bo’s work focuses on how the digital revolution and the rise of information technology have reshaped the postmodern social landscape. By collapsing the boundaries between virtual and physical realities and interweaving them in disjointed, layered ways, his paintings construct epic and sublime narratives. Through this visual language, Zhao Bo explores the aesthetics of chaos, fragmentation, and the vastness of contemporary existence.
Zhang Haijun (1977, Liaoning, China)
He graduated from the Neoclassical Studio of the Oil Painting Department of the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, and is now an associate professor and master tutor at the Academy. As one of the new force of Chinese artists, his works are in many private collections at home and abroad.
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Gallery
