Mosl-Shaolong Mo                                                                                                                      
CV

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Hacker, Sufferer, Beggar, Believer, Shanghai；China；Opening：2023/07/08 16:00-19:00；Duration：2025/07/8-2025/08/25；Address：No. 1, Basement Floor 1, Sunken Courtyard, Lane 9, Qufu Road, Jing'an District, Shanghai


Mo Shaolong: Portrait Avatar

Mo Shaolong hopes to make his images look more like a "window." Through his engagement with Cinema 4D software, the artist has come to recognize the importance of display technology for contemporary painting. Indeed, this is the case: before waking and before sleeping, people see nothing but a few inches of screen. The images on these screens are, in essence, products of analog signals. Engineers strive to encode them using digital technology, thereby circumventing the analog nature of images in relation to reality—technologism attempts to deceive people into believing that the higher the resolution, the closer one gets to reality. But for the artist, the "screen" is a new canvas for painting.

In the film The Matrix, the savior Neo can see the virtual scheme composed of green digital codes. In such a scheme, the differences between images are determined by combinations of numbers. But only Neo—and his arch-enemy Agent Smith—can distinguish what kind of code these images actually are. Mo Shaolong's work is somewhat similar to that of a film director, because in his paintings he designs matrices. First, he searches within the computer screen for metallic colors, smooth shapes, and facial dimensions. Thanks to this freely scalable world, he can ravage these virtual bodies to his heart's content. Mo Shaolong manipulates the patterns within this matrix, a step analogous to the process of classical drawing. Within the constraints of the screen and software, Mo Shaolong does not equate the virtual image with a portrait. Because if he were to do so, then he would have no need to paint it in the physical world.

What Mo Shaolong addresses in the connection between software operation and painting creation is a difficult problem for painting in the digital age: if it can be completed on a screen, then why should a painter paint it? Obviously, when describing computer images, it is difficult for us to resist the temptation of the concept of the "pixel." Its meaning is that an image (picture) is composed of elements. This is the electronic formula of the principle of abstraction. What the concept of the "pixel" emphasizes is that, through blurred boundaries, the physical units of the screen light up the originally black screen within a rectangular space, and its fuel is electric power. Therefore, Mo Shaolong's painting is first of all related to "resolution." Because the pixelated style of the screen still belongs to the display category of digital schemes, rather than to the visual capacity of the naked eye. As far as images are concerned, digital images are always simulation, while painting is always expression. Scientism can divide digital sampling into wavelength intensities in the numerical sense, yet the naked eye is able to see the perceptual intensity of these appearances beyond numerical values.

The key to Mo Shaolong's creation lies in how, without indicating any identity, background, gender, facial features, or setting, to use gesture to redeploy, crush, and sheet-metal the "image" that the painter himself has already determined in the simulated world. During the painting process, the smaller the units of precision in the painter's computer simulation, the greater the difficulty of matching hand and eye in reality. In this regard, Mo Shaolong's painting is an imitation game of self-imposed obstacles. Furthermore, Mo Shaolong's painting provides "substance" for "simulacra" and provides "flesh" for the "digital."

The Matrix still has not escaped the Platonic conception; the difference between the film and the Republic lies in whether the designer of the world is a cold artificial intelligence or a perfect deity. For Mo Shaolong, however, the situation seems to occur simultaneously, because he must appeal to both at once. The most common situation is this: the artist needs to use certain electronic tools and painting materials to achieve what are generally understood as aesthetic effects. In other words, Mo Shaolong works back and forth between two kinds of "screens." Yet the painter must recognize that the limitations and simulational character of digital media are always reproducible, whereas the painter cannot repeat himself. On the other hand, the viewer's specific expectations regarding painterly effects—color, composition, form, structure—depend for their appreciation not only on the picture itself but also on the difficulty of the work's production on the screen. The difference from academic painting is that screen painting adds a further link: its production depends on software, and manual transformation is a provocation to software production. In the computer, the effects Mo Shaolong achieves by pulling and distorting images cannot be evaluated by traditional "craftsmanship"; at the same time, in the physical world, we can only understand digital images as painting: because the inconsistencies of these works' shadows, lines, and distortions are still products of the hand. Therefore, electronic media and painting media become, in contemporary painting, a single plane in which each overcomes the other: the painter is the mediator between the two.

In terms of content, Mo Shaolong's paintings are likewise a kind of intermediary. They are portraits of users, portraits of a sort of "avatar." Here, avatar is defined as an electronic image manipulated by a user. The way an "avatar" is displayed depends on contingent facts generated by a code system. These avatar distortions originate, on the virtual and real levels respectively, from a double instruction added by Mo Shaolong: a "user" portrait is both an anonymous masquerade—these profile faces and half-length figures are the masks of online mobs and devotees—and a moment of "embodied" transformation. While Mo Shaolong converts the digital into images, what he reveals is the vulnerability of the anonymous subject in the real world. By virtue of this vulnerability alone, all statements about the real and the virtual become meaningless within the compulsive interaction of the contemporary screen.

Given the influence of screen aesthetics on contemporary creation, people's concepts of painting theory must be renovated. The new equation is: screen equals art, and vice versa. Images, short films, 15-second music, instant social media updates... the radically transformed art world is merely a game of screen sociality. At present, McLuhan and Warhol increasingly appear correct, because any medium is becoming an exchange station for hot and cool images. Even if an older-generation painter does not use software, he must admit that the value of his paintings depends on the continuous exposure provided by digital algorithms. Today, painting enters art history by first becoming a digital archive. In other words, painting needs to become the realistic copy of a virtual image. The beginning of all this is owed to Ivan Sutherland. In 1962, this future Turing Award winner was writing his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Claude Shannon. In this dissertation, the function of the Sketchpad that Sutherland envisioned was precisely the premise of Mo Shaolong's painting.

Given the influence of screen aesthetics on contemporary creation, people's concept of painting theory must be reformed. The new equation is: screen equals art, and vice versa. Images, short films, 15-second music, instant social media updates... the radically transformed art world is merely a game of screen sociality. Today, McLuhan and Warhol seem increasingly correct, because every medium is becoming an exchange station for hot and cold images. Even if an older-generation painter does not use software, he must admit that the value of his paintings depends on continuous exposure through digital algorithms. Nowadays, painting enters art history by first becoming a digital archive. In other words, painting needs to become the physical copy of a virtual image. The beginning of all this is owed to Ivan Sutherland. In 1962, this future Turing Award winner was writing his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Claude Shannon. In this doctoral dissertation, the function of the Sketchpad that Sutherland envisioned was precisely the premise of Mo Shaolong's painting.

In the same year, 1962, Warhol had just completed the famous Campbell's Soup Cans. These repeatable Pop images treated trademarks as the countenance of the capitalist world. In Mo Shaolong's Avatar portraits, we can likewise see the contemporary face of technocapitalism. Similar to Warhol's square portraits, Mo Shaolong also treats these virtual images as a kind of imaging of social "trauma." The difference lies in the fact that the latter's works lack any original. In this sense, they are closer to the "man without qualities" depicted by the Austrian writer Robert Musil. It reminds us that too much fantasy is not equivalent to real experience, just as the film Avatar posits: the entity manipulating the body of a giant humanoid race is in fact merely a paralyzed warrior. Mo Shaolong directly paints the facially paralyzed Avatar. These paintings show that the procedures and modes of operation of artistic form are not necessarily merely the product of physical application. The medium of the portrait can be canvas and airbrush, but it can also be abstract pixels. For today, before people wake and before they sleep, what they first see on a few-inch screen is still their own face.

-Xia Tian