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「鱼人鸟:三幕剧」
Fish, Bird, and In between:
A Play in Three Acts
Duration: 2024.11.04-2025.02.16
Opening Ceremony: 2024.11.04
Artist: Shen Shaomin
Curator: David Stuart Elliott
Venue: HOW Art Museum 2F, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road Shanghai
Organizer: HOW Art Museum
Partner: Gree
The exhibition hall on the second floor of the HOW Art Museum is currently exhibiting artist Shen Shaomin's solo exhibition Fish, Bird, and In between: A Play in Three Acts. The exhibition presents 3 large-scale installations by the artist Shen Shaomin from recent years in the form of a play with 3 distinct scenes, conveying the artist's observations and reflections on the living environment and human impact on nature.
The following chapters will share the curator David Stuart Elliott's interpretation of the three works presented in the exhibition.

Artist: SHEN Shaomin
Born in Acheng, Heilongjiang Province in 1956, Shen, like many others, experienced famine and hardship as a child, but he found ways of developing his early talent for drawing and printmaking to become recognised and established as an independent artist.
Searching for different ways of expressing his thoughts and feelings, he was fascinated, exhilarated and challenged by the new currents of western art and culture that had begun to flood through China in the late 1970s and '80s. Suddenly, there were no strict rules and almost anything could be art. But what then would become the role and responsibilities of the artist?
Finding answers to these questions has energised Shen since that time, and his work has evolved by looking at, thinking about, and depicting the world and its complexities in ways that are simultaneously critical, empathetic, informative, witty, problematic, inclusive, and constructive.
In this process, Shen has utilised the symbolic devices of metaphor and paradox as ironical, sometimes humorous, ways of accentuating common existential problems and the conflicts and misunderstandings upon which they are based. Aware of the complexity of worldwide networks of ecological and cultural systems, and of how fake news often obfuscates how both are continuously exploited for profit and control, he depicts their vulnerability from different viewpoints and perspectives whilst also revealing the careless ways in which the resources upon which we all depend are so easily destroyed.

Artist SHEN Shaomin in his solo exhibition Fish, Bird, and In between: A Play in Three Acts, 2024?HOW Art Museum
The three, recently made, works shown here are presented in the form of acts in a play. The narrative seems familiar but is not wholly clear. Could it be a tragedy in which one act leads onto the next in a repeated, destructive cycle? Or, taken together, do they form a simple tableau of the stupidity of humanity's negative impulses? As is clear from Shen's previous work, neither of these enclosed views is satisfactory. Each work is both a starting point and a step on a much longer path; they are the concretisation of a chain of problems of which the realisation of their scope and scale is necessary if they are to be mitigated and possibly solved. The virtue of action has to go way beyond that of art and the artist if change is ever to take place.
In this sense, these works could be regarded as frameworks for consciousness-raising but also, as art, they transcend and improve on the mere transmission of information or alarm by elaborating poetic and aesthetic characteristics that that trigger hope and affect the mind and body as much as the intellect.
01
中国鲤鱼
Chinese Carp

SHEN Shaomin's solo exhibition Fish, Bird, and In between: A Play in Three Acts, Exhibition site, 2024?HOW Art Museum
The image of "massacre" that is the subject of Shen's installation Chinese Carp, may be seen initially as a metaphor of alienation, human depravity and its wanton exploitation of nature. A shoal of 2,000 animatronic simulacra of carp, is caught in a net and beached. Their fate, without ceremony, is to be processed, canned and eaten, but as traditional emblems of the nobility of Chinese culture, and as ecological agents that purify the water in which they swim, their current state emphasises the perilous balance between artificial creation, natural harmony, and mass predation. Alienated from nature, packed like industrial units in cans, we know that the carp will be consumed thoughtlessly without regard for their replenishment.


SHEN Shaomin's work Chinese Carp in his solo exhibition Fish, Bird, and In between: A Play in Three Acts, Exhibition site, 2024?HOW Art Museum
Shen's work leaves us with an open question: if we continue to treat the whole world with the same extremity as these carp, and to harness technology and industry with the same motivation of greed, will our alienation from nature not become complete, and the fate of our species as final and desperate as that of the carp?
02
被控制的自然
Nature Under Control


SHEN Shaomin's work Nature Under Control in his solo exhibition Fish, Bird, and In between: A Play in Three Acts, Exhibition site, 2024?HOW Art Museum
Distinctions between reality, and different constructed versions of it, have become a central feature of many of Shen's most recent works which, in his interactive installation Nature Under Control, he approaches from a sensory level at the expense of vast amounts of energy. The result of the "control" in question, however, is undesirable at both extremes: in a reversal of the logic of normal air conditioning, four evaporators and condensers from a high-powered plant are installed separately inside two anonymous, identical spaces. As a result, one of them becomes extremely cold when the evaporators cool down the air inside it, while the other becomes unbearably hot, owing to the warm air released by the condensers.


Aisle leading to two different rooms where evaporators and condensers are located, SHEN Shaomin's solo exhibition Fish, Bird, and In between: A Play in Three Acts, Exhibition site, 2024?HOW Art Museum
Entering this work, visitors experience two artificially and expensively maintained extremes that Shen describes as "a violation of natural law". As a physical analogy of the causes and effects of Global Warming, it is a symbolic enactment of humanity's careless consumption of energy and of its negative attitude towards the effects of this on nature and the environment.
03
被树困扰的鸟
Birds Troubled by Trees


SHEN Shaomin's work Birds Troubled by Trees, 2024?HOW Art Museum
As the title of his third "act" Birds Troubled by Trees, suggests, Shen reiterates the idea of nature under threat but, in this case, its symbolism moves between a real and imaginary framework. To some extent, all creatures are born in "cages" with different kinds of restrictions yet, for some, they are much more extensive than others. In this instance, the expression "as free as a bird" is contradicted by a "forest" of monstruous, leafless trees made out of wire mesh that confine the birds that live inside them. In an intimation of how quickly an environment may mutate from a refuge to a prison, these live birds have been temporarily enlisted as "actors" who incongruously animate the landscape with their rapid, restricted movement and song. Nature, Shen implies, is a matrix that exists on a spectrum between participation and oblivion; as part of the same system in which we all live, it too needs balance and support if it will continue to function. Are we able to provide this?

SHEN Shaomin's solo exhibition Fish, Bird, and In between: A Play in Three Acts, Exhibition site, 2024?HOW Art Museum
Within the exposition and dialogue of this exhibition, each work is both a starting point and a step on a much broader and longer path. Together they are the concretisation of a complex chain of problems, relationships, and potentially perilous events, that, if they are to be mitigated or solved, it is first necessary that we recognise their interconnectedness, scope and scale.

SHEN Shaomin's solo exhibition Fish, Bird, and In between: A Play in Three Acts, Exhibition site, 2024?HOW Art Museum
If real, sustainable change will ever take place, the virtue of action must transform experience if it is to surpass that of art. END
About the artist

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About the curator

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SHEN Shaomin's solo exhibition Fish, Bird, and In between: A Play in Three Acts will remain on display until February 16, 2024.
Welcome to visit the exhibition!
Read more about this exhobition??
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Special Thanks

Thanks to the exhibition partner "Gree Electric" for its strong support to the exhibition!












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