Solo Exhibition ShanghART SUHE, Shanghai
Exhibition Name: Half-Iron Man
Artists: Jiang Xiaoyu
Opening: 2025/09/19 4:00pm
Exhibition Date: 2025/09/19-11/01 (Weds. - Sat. 11:30-18:00, Sun. - Tues. By Appointment: suhe@shanghartgallery.com)
Location: ShanghART SUHE 204, 30 Wen'an Road, Jing'an, Shanghai
Intro Text:
ShanghART Gallery is pleased to announce Half-Iron Man, a solo exhibition by Jiang Xiaoyu, on view at ShanghART SUHE Space, Shanghai, from September 19 to November 1, 2025.
Presenting the artist’s most recent works from the past two years, the exhibition envisions half-human, half-mechanical figures as a means of probing the existential predicaments and psychic landscapes of the individual within contemporary social systems. Drawing imagery from everyday snapshots, cinematic fragments, and news media, Jiang disassembles and reconfigures visual material into unsettling portraits and contorted bodies. In his paintings, these bodily distortions resemble fields of warped reality generated by the artist’s psychic will, evoking a distinctly Kafkaesque sense of disquiet.
Continuing his sustained focus on the fate of the individual under the conditions of the present age, Jiang’s works reflect both his acute observations of, and his perspective on, the objective world. What follows is the artist’s own text, Half-Iron Man—a humorous yet incisive reflection that offers a glimpse into his inner world and the painterly logic that animates his practice.
Half-Iron Man
2025.8.29
Each time an exhibition approaches, I am overcome by a sense of inadequacy. Naming the show, drafting the text—I labor over them endlessly, convinced I’ve found the right title, only to revise the essay a dozen or more times. Yet when I discuss it with friends, the flaws become glaring: contrived arguments, gaps everywhere.
A friend says, “You’re a painter. Why entangle yourself with talk of dark matter and dark energy, or speculation about science fiction, reality, violence, and systems? Those are not your strengths. Your art is rooted in intuition—just speak from your feelings.”
But what feelings? An essay demands specificity, doesn’t it? And so, the more we discuss, the more anxious I become. This afternoon a friend suggested: “Don’t overthink, Xiaoyu. Just send the question to DeepSeek—perhaps it will give you an answer instantly.”
And so I did. I asked:
“Write me a short story of 700–800 words to serve as an exhibition preface. The premise is this: a man in Chongqing seeks to evolve into a being beyond modern humanity, yet his attempts fail. His method of evolution is to devour everything around him, transforming what he consumes into the nourishment of transformation. He wants intelligence, so he swallows his computer, phone, and iPad—only for his skull to square off, his face to become a screen, splitting into two faces. He wants strength, so he consumes boxing gloves, punching bags, and protective gear—his belly turns into a sandbag, his limbs into padded sacks, his head, teeth, and eyes splintering and sprouting from shoulders, stomach, and fists. He seeks agility, so he devours a car—his feet turn into wheels, his chest into a steering wheel, his eyes into a single headlight. Instead of agile, he becomes lumbering and absurd. And so forth. Please render this in the style of magical realism.”
Within a minute, it came up with a complete narrative—remarkably, one that mirrored the imagery of my exhibition itself. I stood transfixed before my phone screen, thrilled yet unsettled, as if I had become the very protagonist of its tale The Self-Devourer: a “Half Iron Man,” a zealot striving to evolve beyond humanity, yet reduced to an ungainly assemblage of rubber, leather, sponge, and scrap metal, his swollen, awkward body wedged hopelessly in the studio doorway.
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