Shao Fan: The Nature of Things

“Perhaps the future is the reflection of the past. When one looks back deeply enough, one begins to see what lies ahead.” —Shao Fan

The Nature of Things brings together a careful selection of three-dimensional works and paintings from different moments in Shao Fan’s practice. Installed throughout the spaces of Mirrored Gardens, the exhibition reveals Shao Fan’s long-standing inquiry into how form comes into being, while inviting us to reconsider how the logic of making shapes our understanding of the world.
     
Shao Fan has repeatedly returned to the chair as a structural prototype, through which to examine relationships between material, structure and the emergence of form. When we encounter Shao Fan’s “chair”, the “mystery of its species” that has accompanied it since its emergence in the 1990s, still seems far from resolved. It remains in a suspended state: neither sculpture in the conventional sense, nor readily classifiable as furniture. Rather, it appears as a structural question. When function is pushed to its limits and craft detaches from utility, when different cosmological systems intersect, might the once closed framework of an object unfold into a fluid path?

Here, the mortise-and-tenon system is no longer a mere craft technique, but a generative principle. The interlocking of convex and concave, of yin and yang, does not dissolve opposition, but sustains equilibrium through tension. By responding to the expansion and contraction of material and the passage of time, structure maintains order through ongoing processes of formation. Craft thus reveals a deeper logic: it not only joins components but organizes relations.

Borrowing the philosopher Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics, mortise-and-tenon may be understood as a generative cosmotechnical prototype that brings heaven, earth, human practice and material into a shared constructive process. This stands in contrast to the cosmological model centered on geometric form that has shaped Western thought since ancient Greece. When geometry enters the mortise-and-tenon system, these two cosmological paradigms overlap within the same object, allowing structure to open outward as a field of relations.

In works created since the turn of the millennium, Shao Fan gradually pushes this logic toward a more autonomous level of form. Structure no longer serves efficiency alone, but becomes a means of articulating proportion and the tension of curved surfaces. Form no longer relies on geometric comparison; instead, it emerges through the continuous modulation of curve and tension.

These concerns extend naturally to the threshold between three-dimensional and two-dimensional realms. The two-dimensional works are not representations of a three-dimensional world, but manifestations of generative processes. Mortise-and-tenon becomes a way of thinking about boundaries between forms: positive and negative shapes gradually define one another. From what appears as an undifferentiated ground—ink on rice paper—forms slowly unfold, moving from indistinction toward the emergence of natural order.
     
Perhaps, when Shao Fan turns backward in order to illuminate the future, we come to recognize that past and future enter into a dynamic polarity—forming a reciprocal, generative relation across time and space. In this sense, such retrospection is not a return to historical forms, but a reflection upon, and renewed practice of, generative principles. 

About the artist
Shao Fan (art name: Yu Han) was born in 1964 to a renowned family of artists in Beijing, where he has lived ever since. He studied painting with his mother and father from a young age.  Since the 1990s, his artistic practice has spanned a wide range of mediums—including three-dimensional works, oil on canvas, ink on rice paper, garden design, and architecture—, exploring the transformation of materials across different times, spaces and states of consciousness.