Mosl-Shaolong Mo                                                                                                                      
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Spiritual Politicians；London；United Kingdom；Opening：2022/7/7；Duration：2025/7/7-2025/7/29；Address：206 Upper Richmond Road West, East Sheen, London, United Kingdom


Mo shaolong：Spiritual Politicians

Mo Shaolong's first solo exhibition with MadeIn Gallery recently opened at Jack Bell Gallery in London, presenting the artist's latest paintings. This marks the first time Mo Shaolong's work has been exhibited in the UK.

While digital technology has brought convenience to human life, it also "decides," "intervenes in," and even forces people to "complete" their own lives. Within spaces shaped by digitalization, the individual gradually retreats from the world, while their digital avatar becomes the subject, stepping to the forefront to perform various functions. The immense pain, confusion, and anxiety caused by this rift between the individual and their digital avatar are precisely the emotional symptoms of humanity in the digital age.

In order to capture this spiritual condition, Mo Shaolong turns to one of the genres in art history most capable of directly expressing contemporary human emotion—portraiture—and attempts to redefine it. While eras and technological changes have repeatedly challenged artistic media, the artist still believes that painting, and portraiture in particular, is an effective way to capture this transformation, and from this a new understanding of the relationship between image and painting emerges. In the new digital context, the artist's use of computer-based image preprocessing is, so to speak, part of his creation or painting, just as the digital avatar/icon is part of human social identity. The tension between the digital avatar and the person themselves is precisely grafted onto the space between Mo Shaolong's "human-machine hybrid" portraits and traditional portraits, initiating a cyborg mode of human existence and painting.



Artist Statement

"Spiritual Politician" is a conceptual positioning I want to give to the exhibition. How one arrives at a positive or emotional individual spiritual condition within a given era is directly related to the technological information people see. Three years ago I returned to painting, and today the visual effects of science fiction, the virtual, and the digital have sparked another stage of my understanding of image cognition. Receiving training in painting was for me a process akin to self-renewal; this forced departure led me to make different choices regarding what is reasonable within cultural differences. With the popularization of information technology, everyone is in fact a participant in this process, and different artists, seeing the essence of content, arrive at different modes of presentation. As I combine, distort, displace, and reset a model itself, the resulting image makes me want to use the actions of simulation and direct painting to create a rehearsed picture. I hope for an emotion of reconciled opposites here, manifested both in the final image of the work and in the very moment when the model's result is generated.

Changes in the environment prompt me to reflect on how I have been shaped by that environment. The possibilities and functions of painting may now possess a more substantial value; the meaning of the images it produces continually allows me to see the entry points into the future that creation can bring about. For example, people have already undergone progressive changes in communication, and the visual transformations brought by technology have given emotion and thought a layered kind of upgrade—that is, only when events and data become indispensable theoretical foundations can one directly enter the present of a topic. We may have already begun to enter a 2.0 system of communication. "Spiritual Politician" summarizes from a certain angle my observation of a particular emotion—a kind of internalized public display, as understood by a participant of the era: passive, startled, curious.

-03/08/2022