55

55 is pleased to announce that Wang Shu Zhong’s individual exhibition ”Unfinished Landscape" will open on the 17th of October 2026, featuring his recently completed mixed-media works on silk and Chinese rice paper. The exhibition is scheduled to conclude on the 7th of November. This marks Wang Shu Zhong’s second solo show at 55, following “The Folds of Perception” last year.

"Unfinished Landscape ~ From Residual Landforms to Generative Abstraction” presents Wang Shu Zhong’s recent painting practice, which is neither traditional landscape painting nor modernist abstraction. Through multiple media, including ink, latex paint, acrylic, spray paint, charcoal, and oil sticks, the artist constructs visual fields that are in constant flux, continuously emerging and dissolving. Here, landscape no longer appears as a natural scenery but is reduced to a generative mechanism - an open process composed of breath, movement, sedimentation, erasure, and reconfiguration. The works resist stable images and clear narratives. What the viewer encounters is an ever-changing topography, a world still in progress. Contemporary art from the Global South is rethinking the relationships between humanity and nature, matter and spirit, tradition and future. Wang Shu Zhong’s practice offers a path emerging from within Chinese landscape painting itself. He neither replicates traditional forms nor simply borrows Western abstract language. Instead, he understands landscape as an open system, a continually evolving network of relations. In this sense, painting becomes a site for the flow of time, matter, and energy. "Unfinished Landscape" does not attempt to answer what landscape means in the contemporary era. Rather, it poses another question: when landscape ceases to be an image and becomes an ongoing process of generation, can we re-understand our relationship with the world and ourselves? Wang Shu Zhong’s works do not depict nature. They resemble traces left by nature. They are not reproductions of landscape, but evidence that landscape is still unfolding.

Wang Shuzhong was born in Lingbi, Anhui province, China in 1987. He graduated from the Art Institute, Shanghai University with a M.F.A. in Art History in 2012. He won John Moor Painting Award in the category of Contemporary Chinese Ink & Colour in 2025.

Starting from ink and wash, Wang Shuzhong dissects its traditional grammar and releases its potential as a tool for spatial perception. Amid the delicate tension between paper and ink, he no longer depicts landscapes but evokes the flow of qi and the generation of space. His paintings are like cross-sectional diagrams of QI fields - immeasurable, unreplicable, and temporary perceptual compositions. In his practice, emptiness is both the blank space in form and the openness of perception. He integrates abstract expression with Eastern spatial philosophy to construct a non-linear, non-solid visual system: lines trace the trajectory of QI, color layers weave rhythms, and blank spaces serve as mediators. He rejects image-based representation and instead captures and translates relationships. Technology in his works is not an addition but an invisible social perception. His paintings are like the weaving of the body against algorithmic logic, attempting to reshape human perception of the hidden dimensions. Here, emptiness is not negation but a form of emergent existence, a folding of time, and an indeterminate state of perception.