28/03/2026
"The Intermediate State" Fu Shuai Solo Exhibition
Art+ Shanghai Gallery
March 13th – May 8th, 2026
Art+ Shanghai Gallery is pleased to present "The Intermediate State", a solo exhibition by Fu Shuai featuring new works from the Fold-Fix and Fold-Texture series alongside recent experiments in "soft sculpture." The exhibition marks a decisive turn in the artist's practice, from material deception to a radical investigation of Light as both generative medium and conceptual subject.
For over a decade, Fu Shuai has occupied a distinctive position within Chinese contemporary art by transforming paper into meticulously elaborated simulacra of oxidized and corroded metal. In this new body of work, he abandons representation entirely in favor of a process he calls "reverse engineering": paper is physically crumpled and compressed into a volumetric form; airbrushed pigment, often incorporating metallic particles, is applied from a single viewpoint; the paper is then unfolded, returning to the flat plane while preserving what Fu names the "light-shadow memory" of its brief three-dimensional existence. The resulting images function less as paintings than as archives, precise documents of the encounter between light and matter in a unique instant.
The Fold-Fix series engages with the visual lexicon of the contemporary metropolis, construction barriers, empty billboard frames, and prefabricated façades through a tension between predetermined industrial patterns and the organic unpredictability of folded paper. Fu's fluorescent palette registers a world in which reality has been thoroughly saturated by the virtual. The Fold-Texture series confronts the natural with the synthetic, rendering wood grain and water ripples in high-purity industrial pigments that have no referent in the organic world, what Fu calls "artificial nature." Complementing these two-dimensional investigations, recent "soft sculpture" works explore paper saturated with acrylic paint that drapes like fabric yet appears as cold, hard metal, reinforcing the ontological ambiguity at the heart of the project.
"The Intermediate State" positions Fu Shuai's practice as a sustained investigation of our contemporary visual condition, a world in which images have definitively supplanted material presence, and where the deceptive character of perception is no longer an optical game but our fundamental existential reality.
