Hive Center for Contemporary Art is thrilled to announce the opening of Fu Liang’s first solo exhibition in Asia, “Echoes of the Void”, at the Hive Becoming space in Shanghai on 6 November, 2024. This exhibition focuses on over a dozen paintings from the artist’s most recent practice; it is curated by Yang Jian and will be on view until 11 December.

Painting is used by Fu Liang as a medium, through which he stimulates the fundamental material nature to provoke the underlying archetypes or cultural complexes of the human unconscious, bringing them a new vitality. The artist refers to it as echo, a formless agitation and flow that exists between but is not limited to the artist and the work, the work and the viewing, and the artist and the present, spreading and circulating in the vacant chambers that are the depths of the conscious and subconscious, and waiting to be preyed upon by the sensitive perceptual nerves in certainty and uncertainty.

For his first solo exhibition in Asia, Fu Liang attempts to create a certain kind of void texture with material, where the works can be intertwined with the space to construct a visual and tactile space of “deep-diving”. The artist perceives the human and social landscapes captured in reality as the source of metaphors of imagination, where all solid metaphors are connected when material imagination unfolds on the basis of such materials, in a constant state of generation. Notably, whether internal to the work or in the space, the nature of water as an invisible yet concrete element is addressed by the artist constantly. Water dualises the person in reverie, not only as an image of the void but also as bringing them into a new material experience. The reflection in the water is often present in Fu Liang’s work, without the material reality that corresponds to such reflection. What you can see may be a landscape, a part of the human body, or the fragments of a vast starry sky. Using water as a medium, Fu Liang collects all kinds of images together and blurs the boundaries between the internal and external space, the visible and invisible worlds in the dissolution of physical objects. He completes the catharsis, interpretation, and expression of his emotions and desires while introducing the viewers to an overlaping place of reverie and reality.

Memory encompasses a very complex process of conceptualisation. Established perceptions not only have to be reiterated but also organised and situated, placed at different moments in time. Most of the objects painted by Fu Liang are framed in their very moments of transformation, both as a particular frame taken from the record of creation, and as moments of energy fluctuation and accumulation, exploring the shapes and specific time and space manifestations of ephemeral existence and memory. Maybe in Fu’s view, the world itself is full of randomness and uncertainty, and is always in a state of flux, so that there is no definite answer to the issues of gender, appearance, physical characteristics, or cultural identities. However, one thing worth noting is that Fu does not attempt to seek some constancy in this flux, but rather explores a multitude of duality through the fluid layers in the creation and transformation of images, exposing to the viewer eternally present moments.