SHANG ZHEXING
尚哲星

Shang Zhexing was born in Henan, China in 2000. He received his BFA degree from School of Visual Arts in New York and completed his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He works primarily with graphite and charcoal, materials that, for him, are closest to the way he first learned to apprehend the world. Monochrome functions like memory: it withholds definitive answers and leaves only traces. Motifs such as city skylines, the ceiling beam he has stared at before sleep, illustrations from childhood textbooks, exaggerated manga muscles, political symbols, and everyday objects —they crowd together within the image without clear sequence or complete narrative; but coexist through fragmentation, repetition, and displacement.

In some works, he focuses on how the body appears in states of tension, suspension, or spatial constraint; in others, the image no longer presents any specific bodily presence, leaving only ambiguous forms and objects that resist clear identification. Through the relationships formed by juxtaposition, value, and volume, whether the body appears in a clearly defined posture or not, the compression, occlusion, and overlapping among the forms consistently carry a bodily logic of force, closely resembling modes of interaction between people. For him, drawing becomes a way of navigating these relationships, while probing what he is actually looking at and what continues to attract his attention. He hopes the works remain open enough to enter yet resistant to full articulation, allowing experiences and perception to organize their own possible narratives within the image.​

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尚哲星，2000年出生于河南郑州，本科和研究生先后毕业于纽约视觉艺和芝加哥艺术学院研。他主要以铅和炭进行绘画，这两种媒介最接近他最早认识世界的方式。单色如同记忆，不提供明确答案，只留下痕迹。城市楼群、睡前凝视的横梁、童年课本中的插图、漫画里夸张的肌肉、政治符号与日常物件……这些来自不同时间与语境的图像被同时挤在画里，没有先后秩序，也不构成完整叙事，而是以断裂、重复与错位的方式并存。

在一些作品中，他关注身体如何显现紧绷、停滞或被迫占据某个位置；而在另一些画面里，形象不再具体，只剩下难以指认的形与物。通过并置、灰度与体积所形成的关系，不管人体是否以明确的姿态出现，这些形体之间的挤压、遮挡和叠加始终带着类似身体的受力逻辑，也很像人与人之间的互动方式。绘画对他而言，正是在这些关系之中反复试探的过程，也是在不断确认自己究竟在看什么、又在被什么吸引。他希望作品能够保持一种可进入却难以完全言说的状态，让经验与感受在画面中自行组织其可能的叙事。

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