Mosl-Shaolong Mo
CV

Exhibition

"Double-click" Painting;Hol-Platform; Shanghai in China;2026;SOLO

Hol Platform will present artist Mo Shaolong's solo exhibition Double-Click "Painting" in January 2026. The exhibition brings together a group of portrait paintings from the artist's recent years, continuing his sustained attention to the human figure while responding to shifts in ways of seeing within today's image environment.

Mo Shaolong has long lived and worked in Shanghai. His practice developed from video work into painting, and he understands painting as a way of creating and organizing visual content. Today, we handle a vast number of on-screen images every day; they are clicked open, screenshotted, color-adjusted, and then sent. These images often no longer exist as "objects to be viewed," but rather as content that is constantly called upon and updated. As a medium, painting in today's image environment in fact shares the same logic of use (operation) as screen images, photography, and software interfaces.

In Double-Click "Painting," painting is treated as a function akin to "image-processing software." Mo Shaolong extracts portraits from video materials and personal memory, translating visual characteristics that originally belonged to the screen into the language of painting. These faces come from relatives in childhood memories, film and television characters he repeatedly watched as a young man, and familiar faces he continually encounters in daily life and news images. They do not appear as personal stories, but rather as collective portraits formed by a generation amid multiple media, narratives, and identity imaginings. The images contain both narrative traces left behind by repeated viewing and certain expressions that are difficult to fully articulate.

"Double-click" points to one of the most common image actions: an image is clicked open, enlarged, swiped past, and closed, rarely truly lingering. Placing "double-click" before "painting" is an acknowledgment that painting has entered the same rhythm of images—no longer an exception outside the screen, but one member among countless images competing for attention. Mo Shaolong does not use painting to resist this reality; instead, he draws on painting's rhythm, the contingency of the hand, and the time of viewing to transform this "double-clicked state" into a creative method: painting is at once an image and an offer of a different kind of gaze. In Double-Click "Painting," Mo Shaolong seeks to use a language closer to contemporary visual experience to consider the characteristics of images rapidly generating and dissipating in the digital environment—those faces that keep sliding by and continuously fading out are here faced anew, returned to a rhythm in which they can be read. The audience is once again brought face to face with these expressions that ceaselessly appear and disappear from the screen.

Artist’s Treat Contemporary Art Week-Yà;Hol-Platform; Shanghai;China;2026

This exhibition takes Yà (轧) as its title, seeking to articulate a contemporary dimension of what might be termed a "domestically produced sensibility." The character ya (轧, yà) functions here as an onomatopoeia—its sonic texture evoking friction and compression, coarse and taut—intimating an awkward yet forceful presence. This "domestically produced sensibility" distinguishes itself from the aesthetics of the "knockoff" or the "vulgar," and cannot be reduced to a mere extension of folk "ugly culture" or the "nonsensical" humor of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Rather, it is a quality that emerges organically from local reality—a fusion of humor and coarseness, a haziness toward the real, and a tension in form—coalescing into a singular "qi" (气). What the exhibition endeavors to delineate is precisely a state of energy lodged within a gray zone. Through contemporary imagery, concepts, materials, and syntax, these works sustain channels of mutual permeation and contamination with the world.

Bodies In-Between；MadeIn Gallery;Shanghai;China;2023

MadeIn Gallery is honored to presentour new exhibition, "Bodies In-Between", in the gallery's main space,featuring recent works by fourartists: Shi Yi, Li Kejin, Wang Ximan,and Mo Shaolong. Throughout theexhibition, the body transforms into animagined world, implying newperspectives on the material world andlife itself. The structured reality of thegallery dissolves into the artists'evocative expressions-charged withdesire, tinged with fantasy, andresonating with the haunting cries ofsolitude. Within this space, utopia,suspense, and fervent hallucinations
arise.

Semi-Manual Era,Animated Paintbrush;GRAVITY ART MUSEUM;Bei Jing;China;2024

Driven by the intention of human together with the order of system, “Animated Paintbrush” is the extension of the artist’s hand and the software’s instructions. From the painting machine modified by the artist, to relatively accessible 3D printers, 3D modeling software, Photoshop, iPads, and iPhones, new painting tools offer unexpected modes of man-machine collaboration. Paint, as well as unconventional painting materials, are layered and collapsed to organize an abstract image. The use, pause, and restart of the software become conditions for the random flow of information. Fictional characters, landscapes, events, and emotions are sketches of the real world with the help of technology. The exhibition “Animated Paintbrush” attempts to present the artist's working method and the dynamic production and viewing behavior it suggests.

Hacker, Sufferer, Beggar, Believer;MadeIn Gallery;Shanghai in China;2023;SOLO

MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present Mo Shaolong’s first solo exhibition in China, “Hacker, Sufferer, Beggar, Believer”, on July 8, 2023, featuring a curated selection of the artist’s recent portraitures. This is also Mo’s first solo exhibition at MadeIn Gallery. Mo's paintings illustrate people in the digital age. He extracts the face, the predominant carrier of emotions, to narrate the mentality of alienation and contradiction experienced by individuals yielded to digital power. In this show, the artist selects an alignment of works on face-size canvases to initiate a ritual of gazing at human beings' status during the interaction with the real and the virtual, calling for the return of our sensual instincts.

With the iteration of 3D technology, virtual avatars aggressively act as the perfect incarnation of real individuals. Simultaneously, the body of information bred by algorithms dilutes entities, holding contemporary people hostage to perceive the world through digital parasitism. Mo seeks immediate data detoxification through progressive portrait painting practice: Undergoing dragging, distorting, and de-forming, the smooth digital surface is peeled off from the virtual bodies, replaced by an uneasy, painted flesh. An artist dwelling in the dual system of painting training and modeling software, by operating on the screen, Mo achieves a spatial deconstruction of the portraits beyond the capability of the naked eye, yet concurrently realizes that the human gene in the hands-on process of painting can barely be replaced by codes. As the characters’ skin is displaced and torn in Mo’s expression rehearsal, the facial glitches seemingly resulting from data malfunction indeed allude to the pulses of our perception: the pain of entangling and estranging between the aspiration for the real and the matrix of the digital. Only by feeling this incidental pain can we justify our being.

Here and now, the humanistic values of portraiture since the Classical Ages are being struck by technology. The rendering engine also attempts to create the perfect portrait through machine-learning and filtching. Hence, in this case, the "errors" in Mo's portraitures tend to inherit the indictment of reality in Francis Bacon’s post-war practice half a century ago. Points, edges, and polygons collide via brushstrokes to generate human figures, forming an expressionist resistance to digital violence. While the artist's hands successively interact with the software and canvas interfaces, the game between data and us unfolds.

Painting Tiny Times;33ml offspace;Shang Hai;China;2023

The title of the exhibition "Painting Tiny Times" is inspired by the series of novels published by Guo Jingming in 2008. The story is set in Shanghai, a city with a booming economy, and portrays an imagined life of urban youth. The film was released 10 years ago. Nowadays, the semantics of "Tiny Times" seems to have quietly changed: all the glitz and glamour is settling down.

AUTUMN SALON SHOW;Jack Bell Gallery;London;UK;2023

Jack Bell Gallery is pleased to present a Salon Show including work by:

Aboudia
Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou
Ajarb Bernard Ategwa
Baatarzorig Batjargal
Andrew Maughan
Lavar Munroe
Marc Padeu
Felipe Rezende
Raphael Sagarra aka Finok
Mo Shaolong
Rodel Tapaya
Zhong Wei

USB Multi-Port Connection Exhibition, "in the park" site;Shanghai;China;2021

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a serial bus standard for connecting computer systems with external devices, and a technical specification for input/output interfaces. Yet at this very moment, by a twist of fate, it has been transformed into a byword for a certain artistic endeavor—a threshold for establishing connections across multiple dimensions and new linkages.

The exhibition takes this state of ceaselessness and inconstancy as its foundational concept, defining an uncertain condition of linkage among artists, curators, and different spaces. The artist is no longer the origin or the endpoint, but instead becomes an interface connecting both ends; spaces and curators briefly converge and exchange information here, only to be carried away at a certain moment. A series of exhibition activities will be distributed across galleries, non-profit spaces, buyer's shops, nightclubs, and art fairs throughout Shanghai. If the works exhibited by each artist and the analyses of the curators are all fragments, then after viewers have traversed these distinctive spaces in their entirety, they may perhaps assemble a complete puzzle—thereby gaining an overview of the unique landscape of the new post-90s generation of artists. This is not a wave or a movement, nor is it grand or metaphorical, but rather a sexy presentation of the interface itself.

Spiritual Politicians;Jack bell Gallery;London;UK;2022;SOLO

Jack Bell Gallery is pleased to present a solo show of new paintings by Mo Shaolong. This will be the artist's first exhibition in the UK.

Shaolong (b.1989, Henan, China) currently lives and works in Shanghai. Through his use and reflection of cinema4D software, Mo seeks to redefine the long-standing genre of portraiture. Mo sees himself as belonging to the generation informed by globalisation, the Internet, and digital technology. In this sense, his work hints at the fact that every present-day individual is a cyborg, whose ethos exhibits a human-computer hybridity. Hence, for Mo, contemporary portraiture must capture and express the immense pain and confusion of human beings who have to be equipped with digital technology. Such human-computer hybridity is merely the latest symptom of the complex and lengthy relationship between humans and technology, or in Mo's words, 'the error', and should be the starting point for our reflection on the myth of human creativity.

Hereoitary Territory;POWERLONG MUSEUM;Shang Hai;China;2021

"Hereditary Territory" — an art party presented by the Powerlong Museum as part of its "Spring Scream Art Festival" — is an art exhibition project centered on the establishment of territory. Beyond expressing the concept of "territory" through spatial scale and positional arrangement, its approach to display strives to embody a "territorial contest," setting its gameplay apart from other exhibitions. Compared with the mainstream "resource-plundering" exhibitions on the market, Hereditary Territory can be classified as a "land-contention" strategic exhibition.