Shen Fan’s Works in Abstraction
Eli Klein Gallery
This catalogue essay was commissioned on the occassion of Shen Fan: Works in Abstraction, 1992–2017 at Eli Klein Gallery. Mandarin translation by Phil Cai.
The essay traces a single coherent philosophical project, beginning with early paintings that merge Chinese brush-and-ink landscape convention with Western all-over abstraction, through the “ShanShui” series—in which humanity's influence on nature has undeniably altered it—and into the “Punctuation” series, where newspaper text becomes a third, informational landscape.
Exhibition Catalogue (PDF)