The Great Portrait 大肖像

The Great Portrait betrays the genre its name suggests. Instead of rendering figurations, the artist pieced numerous unrelated objects in one work, including the human silhouette, stables, teapots, cabins, and buddha statues. These imageries are conjured on/in a container in the shape of sectioned human stomach. In the back of the stomach depiction, a draft of figure painting looms -- the draft should be in its most preliminary form. To align objects (in the stomach ) that traverse through time and space, pictorial and realistic logic, Shang might reflect a reality of social values of the 1990s\u27 China -- fragmentary, splicing, and explorational. Shang Yang commented on this work: In the typical Chinese cultural schema of \u27The Great Portrait\u27, I blend the improvisational emotions with fragmented information and feelings of the early 90s (China), in a certain pop-art method; what emphasized this experimental nature (of the work\u27s meaning) is the unfinished state of the work. (Translated from Chinese) (Lixiangguo, 尚扬——画风景，画的不仅仅是风景, September 21, 2018, available on https://www.sohu.com/a/255132355_686587) (Jerry Wu\u2723).https://digital.kenyon.edu/zhou/1225/thumbnail.jp