Shao Yong is a an early mid-career Chinese painter who graduated from art school in Xi'an in 1997. In 2002, he made his way to Beijing,where he became an independent artist. He has made some headway as an academic--he is currently in charge of ink painting in the academy he studied at in Xi'an, but his reputation rests on the markedly different two styles he is known for: a realistic manner, often dark to the point of being macabre, complete with skeletal,leafless trees and strange personages such as upright, angry hogs;and another other way of working, more lyrical but also mysterious, which consists of flat portrayals of color, often red and blue, that sit next to each other and contain within them brushy, curling strokes that are visible but hard to make sense of. These markings don't seem to represent anything in particular. They also exist in extreme contrast to the barren, twilit landscapes that look like stills from a privately imagined horror film.

　　The nighscapes don't tell us much beyond establishing a certain menace bordering on horror. Landscape Kingdom 15 (2018)--the entire show is called "Landscape Kingdom"--consists of a group of standing pigs surrounded by a blackish-white, semicircular fame, with a dark-blue sky and leafless trees in the background. Above is a gray sky with dark clouds and more gray trees; abstract- expressionist drips cascade down the painting, where they fall across two horizontal stripes--one blue and one black. The pigs amount to a mob and communicate an unknown threat to Yong's audience. It is an allegory of trouble, although we don't know what the exact point means. Landscape Kingdom 9 (2018), like the rest of the works in the show an ink painting, is wonderfully evocative of the past: a classical, white stone horse's head and upper chest, half hidden by a murky atmosphere and the inevitable naked trees, sits in the right of the composition, while a brownish twilight takes over the ambience and contrasts sharply with the animal. Again, we don't know what this suggests, but it seems to be about the persistence of an art legacy in the middle of a current set of circumstance that go nowhere, offering no hope. It can be read as a personal statement, or as a social one--maybe it is meant as both.

　　The paintings described above are mysterious and vaguely troubling. But the second group of paintings, resolutely abstract and simple in their flat expanses of color, look to Western abstraction for their inspiration. Composed of direct planes of color, in rectangles and squares that sit side by side, the very simplicity of what we see makes us think of the history of geometric abstraction in Europe, which began roughly a hundred years ago. Each of the panels has a barely discernible mass of curving brush marks in black, which cannot be linked to anything readable as figuration. The works are an exercise in determining just how resolutely nonobjective the imagery can be, determined as Yong is to create a world whose elements of physical expressiveness are interesting enough in their own right to gain the interest of Yong's audience, even if their meaning is entirely opaque. In Mahamudra 4 (2018), a luminous blue panel, busy with curling brushstrokes, sits beside a bright red square. The title refers to an important set of teachings in Tibetan buddhism; while Young is Chinese, clearly his interest extends to other cultures. The reality the painting portrays is hidden, unknowable, and of immense intelligence.

　　Yong is concerned with spiritual realities that may not find their way easily into the awareness of his audience in Chelsea in New York. But that does not mean his meaning is lost. Esoteric meanings, in buddhism especially, hide behind everyday life or even caricature (as happens in the pig painting described above). Whether we know it or not, the world is acting in conjunction with our thoughts and actions, whose consequences lead to openings or closures in our beliefs. The pigs may stand for negative mind, while the horse may represent the dignity of our path, but it hard to say. Maybe that is why Yong includes the nonobjective paintings, whose determined contemporaneity leads nowhere but back to the image. He seems to be saying that if art is the only thing we have, it is everything we have.

Jonathan Goodman