On May 8, 2026, contemporary artist Sang Huoyao presents his most ambitious and materially expansive solo exhibition to date, Sang Huoyao: Brushstrokes of the Universe, at Museum of Art Pudong (MAP), Shanghai. Marking his return to a major institutional context in Shanghai following solo exhibitions at the Shanghai Art Museum (2012) and the Long Museum (2019), the exhibition is curated by international curator Jonas Stampe.

At the core of the exhibition lies the notion of the “brushstrokes of the universe,” a conceptual field through which Sang Huoyao’s artistic practice from 1998 to the present is re-encountered. Bringing together 52 works produced primarily over the past seven years, the exhibition spans painting, installation, AI-based interaction, and performance, tracing a practice that continuously repositions ink painting within shifting technological and spatial conditions.

The opening ceremony of the exhibition（from the left：Xiao Ge, Jonas Stampe, Sang Huorao and Unitree Robotics)

The exhibition unfolds across four interrelated sections: “All Things Radiate Light,” “Energy Fission,” “Converging and Dispersing Brushstrokes,” and “Journeys in Motion.” Moving from the monumental silk work Birth under the Sky to the five-panel series Energy Fission, from the aluminum installation Cosmic Dwelling to the performance How to Explain Paintings to a Living Humanoid Robot, the exhibition follows how the artist’s foundational “square brushstroke” is gradually extended beyond the surface of painting into spatial, procedural, and post-medium conditions of perception.

Artist Sang Huorao

The “brushstrokes of the universe” is not presented as a metaphor, but as a conceptual proposition that emerges through practice. In Sang Huoyao’s work, the square functions as a minimal unit of perception. Through repetition and accumulation, these units do not construct representation but instead form a field of perception shaped by duration, rhythm, and sustained looking.

Square Brushstrokes: Twenty-Eight Years of Practice

Sang Huoyao’s practice begins in 1998, at a moment when he turns away from both the pictorial conventions of traditional Chinese painting and the gestural languages of Western Abstract Expressionism. What remains is the square — an elementary and neutral visual unit that does not refer to any image, symbol, or representation.

Through continuous repetition, the square accumulates over time into dense fields of black, white, grey, and monochrome structures. These surfaces are not images in a conventional sense, but records of duration — traces in which time, attention, and bodily rhythm become material.

The logic of repetition here is never mechanical. Each unit marks a decision, a pause, a moment of perception. Over nearly three decades, the square gradually shifts from a formal constraint into a perceptual system — one that constantly reconsiders order, space, and the act of seeing itself.

Exhibition View of Sang Huoyao: Brushstrokes of the Universe at Museum of Art Pudong

Affective-imagoism: Chaos, Perception and Emptiness

The artist defines his practice through the notion of "Affective-imagoism" （境象主义）, which unfolds across three interrelated registers. At the level of practice, it is grounded in the accumulation of square brushstrokes, where repetition operates as a temporal structure through which order is continuously negotiated within uncertainty.

At the level of perception, it engages with conditions of chaos and emptiness. The works do not depict recognizable forms or narratives but instead construct fields in which meaning emerges only through sustained attention. “Affects” （境） is not image, but a condition of perception.

At the level of thought, Affective-imagoism draws from Eastern philosophical traditions—particularly Daoist and Buddhist ideas of emptiness, impermanence, and inwardness—though these are not illustrated, but activated through a contemporary visual system based on modular repetition and accumulation.

Exhibition View of Sang Huoyao: Brushstrokes of the Universe at Museum of Art Pudong

From the Sacred to the Human

After 2020, Sang Huoyao’s work undergoes a quiet but decisive shift. The previously restrained monochromatic surfaces open into more complex chromatic conditions. This is not a formal transition alone, but a reorientation of sensibility. Within the layered structure of the square, emotional intensities—tension, fluctuation, softness, rupture—begin to appear as embedded conditions of perception. Color becomes not expressive decoration, but an extension of lived experience. What emerges is a movement away from metaphysical abstraction toward a more direct engagement with human presence—where painting is no longer positioned above life, but within it.

Sang Huorao, Gazing the Universe, 234x200cm, Mixed Media on Silk, 2023Sang Huorao, Energy Fission Series 2024 1-5, 350x200cmx5, Mixed Media on Silk, 2024

Expanding the Language of Ink: AI, Robotics, and Installation

A key development in Brushstrokes of the Universe lies in Sang Huoyao’s expansion of ink-based practice beyond silk and paper into installation, artificial intelligence, and performance. In this shift, painting is no longer bound to medium, but operates as a condition that can be translated, displaced, and reconfigured.

Among the most significant works is the performance How to Explain Paintings to a Living Humanoid Robot, developed in collaboration with Unitree Robotics in Hangzhou. The work stages an encounter between human perception and non-human intelligence, where questions of embodiment, duration, and affects become central. While artificial systems may process visual data, the work turns toward what cannot be processed—experience, presence, and lived attention.

The installation Cosmic Dwelling extends this inquiry through aluminum-based brushstrokes that translate gesture into industrial material. Here, the language of painting is displaced into a material environment shaped by technological infrastructure, standardized space, and digital mediation. Within this condition, perception itself becomes something continually reorganized.

Exhibition View of Sang Huoyao: Brushstrokes of the Universe at Museum of Art PudongSang Huorao, Seeing the Unseen Series No. 01, 226x76x12cm, Metal Aluminum Plate, 2025

A Third Path Between East and West

Sang Huoyao’s practice draws from multiple genealogies: from Mi Fu, Ni Zan, and Huang Binhong, to Mondrian, Cézanne, and Rothko. Yet it resists any stable categorization within either “New Ink Painting” or Western abstraction. As the artist states: “I do not align myself, nor define myself—I simply exist.”

This position is not a declaration of identity, but a mode of practice. While structurally informed by Eastern philosophical thought, including Daoist and Buddhist traditions, Sang’s visual language operates through abstraction, modularity, and repetition in a form that remains internationally legible.

This condition opens up what may be understood as a third path—neither East nor West, neither tradition nor modernity, but a space where these distinctions begin to lose their necessity.

Sang Huorao, Purple Series 06, 200x200cm, Mixed Media on Silk, 2025Sang Huorao, Million Lights, 350x200cm, Mixed Media on Silk, 2025

Rather than functioning as a retrospective, Brushstrokes of the Universe operates as an ongoing proposition. It suggests that contemporary artistic practice may begin from the smallest perceptual unit, while still holding open questions of time, technology, and subjectivity.

Within increasingly fragmented conditions of perception, Sang Huoyao’s accumulative brushstrokes propose a mode of attention grounded in duration and stillness. Emerging through layered complexity, the works do not resolve fragility, but hold it open as a condition of contemporary experience.

About the Exhibition

Sang Huoyao: Brushstrokes of the Universe

Curator: Jonas Stampe

Assistant Curator: Li Dezhong

Opening: May 8, 2026

Venue: Museum of Art Pudong

Specially supported by Unitree Robotics.

Courtesy of the artist and the organizer.