After the Dissolve

The term “ Tu of the Tang Dynasty. It refers to an artistic style that is tranquil, natural, and free from artifice: “Residing in simplicity and Chongdan” (literally “dissolve”) originates from the second chapter of The Twenty-Four Categories of Poetry by Sikong tranquility, its subtle essence is profound; infused with the great harmony, one soars alongside the solitary crane...” Throughout Chen Shuxia’s artistic practice, “dissolve” is not merely an aesthetic pursuit, but more fundamentally a creative methodology rooted in her individual intuition. Through “dissolve,” she has successfully brought her works to a state where antiquity and contemporaneity coexist in a realm between presence and absence, within the clamorous context of contemporary life.

“After” has two interpretations: synchronic and diachronic. The synchronic “after” points to the latent meaning of “dissolve” as a creative methodology; the diachronic “after” refers to a process that is not a stylistic transformation, but rather a reconstruction of painting's internal mechanism. On the synchronic level, “dissolve” manifests as a perceptual structure. By reducing intensity and eliminating directionality, it frees painting from its dependence on images and generating a critical viewing mechanism. This holds true for both Chen Shuxia's new works and her older ones. From a diachronic perspective, Chen Shuxia's “dissolve” can be understood as a gradually established operational logic. By persistently weakening painting's certainty, she pushes her works from the realm of “presence” toward a zone of “approaching absence.” Her new works, including Veiling the Sun, Fleeting Touch, painting's internal mechanism through the weakening of images and delayed generation. Soft Murmurs, Like Mist, Like Wind, and Slow Flicker, fully demonstrate the artist's wisdom and energy in reconstructing Chen Shuxia's ongoing experience of presence amid low intensity and uncertainty.

In other words, the operational logic of painting generates After the Dissolve is an open state. It neither ends in fixed meaning nor returns to emptiness, but sustains an the perceptual structure of viewing: how Chen Shuxia paints determines how we see. Thus, Chen Shuxia's "dissolve" is no longer merely a style or artistic conception, but a mediating mechanism that connects creation and viewing. It exists not only in the making of the work, but is continually activated in the viewer's act of seeing.

Curator Pi Daojian