Liang Shuni Solo Exhibition: Solo Awakening
hangzhou
May 2 to June 14, 2026
Liang Shuni Solo Exhibition: Solo Awakening
Liang Shuni Solo Exhibition: Solo Awakening 
Artist：Liang Shuni
Exhibition: Solo Awakening
Duration：May 2 to June 14, 2026
Opening：4:00 PM, Saturday, May 2, 2026
Live Streaming: Saturday, May 2, 2026, 10:00 am
The exhibition brings together Liang’s most recent works from the past two years. These works do not emerge from a unified “self,” but from multiple subjectivities that observe one another. In her new paintings, Liang mobilizes shifting perspectives—her subjectivity differentiates into figures of varying gender, identity, and role, allowing them to look at, converse with, confront, and reconstruct one another.
Shadow Game (2025, oil on canvas, 40 × 50 cm) serves as one of the central threads of the exhibition. Liang detaches the shadow from the body, allowing it to interact with objects in the real world and generate its own narrative. In works such as Transition, Lock Eyes, and Costume, the shadow is no longer subordinate to the body but assumes the position of an autonomous “other”: it gazes at the body, dresses it, and even enters into a reversal of power relations with it. This condition reflects “Solo Awakening”: only in a state of lucid solitude does the shadow fully emerge. Liang further extends this logic by transforming the shadow into a visual embodiment of differentiated selves.
In the Hen Painting series (2025–2026, oil on canvas, feathers, pencil, etc.), Liang adopts an ironic approach to deconstruct the idealized masculinity traditionally embodied in rooster paintings within Chinese painting. The “condition of the hen” depicted here—expending great effort to accomplish small tasks, struggling to reconcile ideals with daily life, gaining only modest confidence from pursuing one’s own desires—operates both as an articulation of lived female experience and as a self-reflexive gesture from a shifting gendered perspective. Positioned simultaneously as “rooster” and “hen,” Liang observes and differentiates these roles. This constitutes not only a critique of patriarchal visual traditions, but also an exposure of the closed, absurd, and latent violence beneath the apparent order of a binary gendered world.
Another key thread in the exhibition concerns relationships—between individuals, and between humans and nature. Reconstructing an Embrace (2026, oil on canvas, watercolor, sewing, acrylic, gold leaf; triptych) builds upon the artist’s 2023 work Day and Night , which examined how conflict arises, and turns instead to the question of what follows: how reconstruction becomes possible. Liang’s response is to strip away the layers of culture, preference, and ideology, returning to a fundamental, unmediated mode of encounter.
This process of reconstruction also unfolds within the self. In a state of lucid differentiation—where multiple identities coexist across gender—the “embrace” between these internal figures proves more difficult, and more vital, than conflict itself.
“Solo Awakening” thus names an ongoing process of division and observation—one without endpoint, and without a singular self to declare the work complete.
ABOUT ARTIST
Liang Shuni was born in Guiyang, Guizhou in 1989. She graduated from the Fashion Design program at Yunnan Arts University in 2010 and currently lives in Guangzhou. Liang has a sensitive ear for daily life—keenly attuned to multiple perspectives. Her expression emerges from reality, while the proliferation of her thoughts draws her once more into a life suspended between the real and the imagined. Recent solo exhibitions include Inner Turmoil (Hunsand Space, Beijing, 2024) and Forest Farm (Hunsand Space, Shijiazhuang, 2023).
