Editor’s note: Themed on “Chasing the Light”, 2025 CAFA Graduation Season kicked off at CAFA Art Museum in early summer. Surrounded by diversified creations, visitors may find that some of graduates chose performance to burst their inner impulses, some chose to interact with the space to build their visual tension, and some got inspired from traditions to bring about more contemporary creative appearances. More young creators are paying their attention to drawing materials from the life around them, trying to capture the multiple realities of emotions, experiences and thoughts...
In these cases, the collisions between individual experience and the external world, between new and old media, as well as between virtual life and real life have repeatedly inspired their creativity that may not be perfect but fresh. CAFA graduates who believe in “light”, follow the light in their hearts and present their initial explorations of “what art is” that have been honed for several years at their degree shows. Featuring interviews with graduates at Phase B Undergraduate Students Exhibition, “CAFA Graduates Who Believe in ‘Light’”, invites graduates to talk about their creative stories from a more microscopic and in-depth perspective, and we would like to share and convey the “light” in the hearts of young people through these candid and vivid narrations.
The City of Theseus
By Shang Yifei, Department of Landscape Painting, School of Chinese Painting
My work was inspired by a creation class instructed by Prof. Feng Haitao in 2023. He required that we should create “landscape paintings” without the emergence of “mountains” and suggested us to find correspondences with contemporary life from traditional motifs.
The City of Theseus: Prototype
The City of Theseus: BJ
The City of Theseus: SZ
I think that starting from the core of the landscape view provides a more profound way, and the surface of landscape painting should contain an artist’s cognition of the world and his or her attitude towards life. For me, it should also become my cognition of my surrounding environment. I realized that the fast-paced life is like a tense game, where we are constantly faced with choices and choose to win or lose, and that’s how City of Tetris came in.
The City of Theseus: BJ (detail)
The City of Theseus: SZ (detail)
I have built a constructing game on the game console boxes, so that the blocks themselves have been endowed with meaning, and new meanings are born between combination and elimination. In terms of logic and graphics that I have accomplished from “The City of Theseus: Prototype” in 2023 to the current series “The City of Theseus: BJ” and “The City of Theseus: SZ”, I feel that I have achieved a particularly powerful way!
The City of Theseus: BJ (detail), CBD in Beijing
The City of Theseus: BJ (detail), The First Ring Road in Beijing
The City of Theseus: SZ (detail), Clouds reflected on the glass curtainwalls
The City of Theseus: SZ (detail), Sea in Shenzhen
The City of Theseus: SZ (detail), Green screens in Shenzhen
Beijing is the city where I have studied and lived, and Shenzhen is where I grew up. Beijing is the capital of China and Shenzhen is a special economic zone, the atmosphere and temperament of the two cities are completely different, so do my experiences in them.
Quoted from “The Ship of Theseus” which is a classic philosophical paradox, my works reflect metabolisms recycling in the establishment and renewal of cities, the accumulation and elimination of Tetris, and the human bodies.
The Painting Process
The Painting Process
GAME BOY, the Prototype of frames for my works
What I want to paint are not real landscapes, but simulacra of the urban spirit. Thus I classified the functionally representative objects in the city as six combination units in the game, just like the objects that often appear in traditional landscape paintings, such as “mountains, water, roads, boats, bridges, and people”, which can be presented as habitable and movable sections through the arrangement of the composition, and convey the corresponding emotions.
Exhibition View
The Installation Process
I wanted to provide a cognitive framework if life can be compared to a grand game. Observing daily life from a third-person perspective, I find that every response is like an operation in the game. This detachment of perspective wonderfully dissipates the pressure from some reality.
Shang Yifei introduced her works to visitors.
I have always aspired for excellence and an unlimited attitude towards life, which is the light in my heart that will never be extinguished. With this light, my body will be stronger and my soul will be more solidified!
Portraits of Shang Yifei
Text and Image Courtesy of Shang Yifei, edited (EN) by Sue/CAFA ART INFO.
