Shu Qun

signed in Chinese and dated 1993 on the reverse

Private Collection, China

Lu Peng, 1990-1999 Contemporary Art History of China, Hu Nan Fine Art Publishing House, Chang Sha, March, 2000, p.47

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Perhaps in reaction to his childhood experience with mental patients, Shu Qun was intellectually preoccupied with philosophical rationalism throughout the 80's and 90's. As a result of the drastic economic and political transformations that China experienced during these years, idealism was replaced by utilitarianism. This shift in social climate affected Shu Qun's intellectual direction as well as his views on his personal situation and he developed an interst in empiricism and analytical philosophy. According to the artist himself, he then moved from being an existentialist to an empiricist, and finally a structuralist. Shu Qun's art likewise entered a transitional phase that he refers to as the period of "the descent of the sacred." This is the social and intellectual context of his 1992 series Identical Voice Series - A Post Vanguardism? As the title suggests, the rhetoric of "absolute principles" and "reaching for the other shore" that Shu Qun subscribed to in the 80's has ceased to have meaning and is replaced with a baseline rhetoric of "voices of identity." Visually, Shu Qun's works are a series of spiritual ruins: rendered in cool tones in strings of geometric shapes, the mysterious, vaguely religious architecture somewhat evocative of the absolute principles of the 80's.. Yet the mood is of an elegiac farewell: by the 90's these principles were no longer viable.

Identical Voice Series - A Post Vanguardism? has been published many times. After 2005, Shu began to recite and remake the iconographies of the Absolute Principles and Voices of Identity in the Symbolic Order series.. Thus Voices of Identity can be seen as a summation of Shu Qun's art in the 1990's—as he puts it, "This is one of the milestones in my creative career."