Memory, Noise, Ghosts: The New Paintings of Mo Shaolong
Writer: 唐鎏
Date: 16/09/2026
Keywords:
A year ago, artist Mo Shaolong moved studio far out towards the end of Shanghai Metro Line 9. Compared with the last one, this was a place where “you might go days without a few words with anyone,” keeping him at a remove from Shanghai’s active art scene. Still, when speaking of the benefits, Mo remarks: “It benefits the work, and it suits my temperament.”
20206年8⽉10⽇ 艺术家⼯作室窗外
说这话时，他正蹲在地上，用一号尺寸羊毛刷的笔头，有节奏地敲击着一块悬挂在墙上的布面。随着稀释油彩的不断叠加，一些轮廓柔和的形状开始逐渐显现出来。这是一种在效果上近似喷枪，在方法上又与点彩不无关系的画法。由于整个画面的基础都是一种单一半透明颜色的叠加变化，其又与单通道图像的形成有着相似的逻辑。同时，正如艺术家所言，这也是一种更符合他 “性子”的绘画方式，内敛、单调、节制，能创造出一些朦胧的、带有怀旧感的空间以及幽灵。
As he says this, he squats on the ground, rhythmically tapping a canvas hung on the wall with the tip of a size‑one brush. With successive layers of diluted oil paint, softly contoured forms gradually emerge. The technique yields effects akin to airbrushing, yet bears affinities with pointillism. Built entirely through layered shifts of a single translucent colour, it follows a logic comparable to single‑channel image. Meanwhile, as the artist observes, this painting method also fits his “temperament”: restrained, monotonous and measured, it conjures hazy, nostalgia‑tinged spaces and ghosts.
作品《⻉⻉》局部，2025，布⾯油彩，30x40cm
对于熟悉莫少龙的人而言，理解他所说的“性子”是什么并不困难，也不难看出在过去一年的创作里，他找到了一个舒适区，一种问题意识与表达欲上的平衡。而对于初次见到他近来新作的观众来说，这一画法也带来了一些特殊的视觉感受：在上半年于洞-当代艺术中心举办的展览“‘双击’绘画”中，莫少龙展出了一批取材自千禧年前后影视、新闻、大众文化的人物肖像。这是一批初看之下颇为“伤感”，但很快又将人卷入一种更当下（而非更怀旧）的“恍惚”中的绘画。画中的人物对国内的观众而言大多并不陌生：牯岭街少年杀人案》的少女小明，贾樟柯的小武、施瓦辛格、赵本山。而即使是另一些以职业或是身份为标题的无名人物（《罪犯》《秘书》），人们似乎也能从中看出一种“年代感”：艺术家1989年出生，完整经历了此后中国大众的精神世界飞速膨胀起来，同时，社会的公共空间、话语也日渐喧哗、复杂起来的时代。
For those who know Mo, it is not hard to grasp what he means by the word “temperament”, nor to see how over the past year of work he has found a comfort zone, striking a balance between the questions that concern him and what he desires to express. For viewers encountering his recent new works for the first time, these paintings also elicits distinctive visual sensations. At his solo exhibition “Double Click”: Painting held earlier this year at Hol Platform, Mo presented a series of portraits drawn from films, television, news and popular culture around the millennium. At first glance these paintings carry a distinct note of melancholy, yet they soon draw viewers into a sense of disorientation rooted in the present， rather than in nostalgia. Most figures depicted are well‑known to Chinese audiences: girl Ming from A Brighter Summer Day, Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Zhao Benshan, and so on. Even unnamed figures titled by occupation or identity, such as Criminal and Secretary, exude a sense of an era — Born in 1989, the artist lived through a period when the Chinese public’s inner world expanded at tremendous speed, while public discourse and social space grew increasingly loud and complex.
“双击”绘画 展览现场，洞-当代艺术平台，上海，2026
《⼩明》，2025，布⾯油彩，30x40cm（左）
《小武》，2025，布面油彩，30x40cm（右）
《小武》，2025，布面油彩，30x40cm（右）
用莫少龙自己的话说，那是一个近乎“文化战争”，充满了各式各样的热潮、刺激、冲击力的时代。然而，回过头去看时，他却发现自己对那一时期的困惑已远远大过怀念：自己的确曾为许多事物着迷过，但它们都是零散的，不足以成为某种身份，某种具有概括力的符号，而在那样的一段现实与当下之间，他也搭建不起足够有效的联系：今天大环境给人的感知往往是原子化、信息化的，很难从中捕捉上一个时代所谓“热潮”以及大众的集体情绪的踪影。
In Mo’s own words, it was an age near of cultural warfare, filled with cultural waves, enthusiasm, excitement and shocks. Looking back, however, he finds himself far more perplexed by that period than nostalgic — He was genuinely captivated by many things back then, yet those fascinations remained too fragmentary to form an identity or to be a symbol of era. Moreover, he struggles to forge viable connections between that bygone reality and the present — Today’s social atmosphere feels atomised and highly informatised, leaving few traces of the fads and collective public emotions that defined the earlier era.
事实上，抛开艺术家那“文化战争”的比喻，在知识界更通行的“八九——奥运”的断代中，世纪之交的文化氛围，社会的精神面貌，的确在奥运年后发生了突然的转变，几乎一种“断裂”。而在近年的流行文化中，也不乏以“梦核”这样更加直觉化的方式去把握那一时期的尝试。这自然可以说是一种当代性的典型体现，但对于身处时代中的艺术家个体来说，这也的确造成了一些文化归属上的困难。
Beyond the artist’s metaphor of cultural warfare, the periodisation more commonly used in intellectual discussions, from 1989 to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Indeed, the cultural ethos and social mental landscape around the turn of the century underwent an abrupt, almost ruptural shift after the 2008 Olympics. Recent popular culture has seen intuitive attempts such as “dreamcore” to grapple with this epoch. This can be understood as a characteristic of contemporaneity, yet for individual artists living through these times, it generates real difficulties of cultural belonging.
《间隙》，2025，布⾯油彩，80x100cm
回到绘画，莫少龙同样也发现，尽管他希望在绘画上处理这样的经验，但当下的绘画语境似乎并未提供给他一个合适的空间：在上一个阶段的创作中，他已有过一些为身处数字空间的人物赋予某种地域感、文化感的尝试——以近似战后绘画的方式，在建模软件中变形、扭曲他们，绘成肖像。然而，尽管就制造或者说虚构一种数字时代的身份性而言，他或多或少地成功了，但这些人物（注意，不是这些作品）似乎仍旧缺少某种“阻力”，缺少一种他所期待的，能够抵御图像流之平滑的“摩擦”。
Turning back to painting: Mo wanted to process these lived experiences through his art, yet found little suitable space within current painting discourse. In an earlier body of work, he had already tried to endow figures in digital space with a sense of place and cultural grounding. Using approaches evocative of post‑war painting, he distorted and manipulated figures in 3D‑modelling software before painting. While he met partial success in inventing digital‑era identities, the figures — not the artworks— still lacked a certain resistance: the friction he sought, something that could push back against the seamless flow of digital images.
USB多端⼝连接展，in the park站现场 ，2021（左）
“双击”绘画 展览现场，洞-当代艺术平台，上海，2026（右）
“双击”绘画 展览现场，洞-当代艺术平台，上海，2026（右）
这同样也是今天我们在观看许多试图对“技术”做出某种讨论的绘画时的一种常见的感受：“数字图像”，或者说新的视觉技术，已被视为绘画在当下所要面对的一个课题。然而，艺术家接近这一命题的同时，又总是令人感到隔了一层窗户纸：这些作品与“技术”的关系倒是很清楚了，但它们与艺术家本人的关系是什么？与观众的关系又是什么？换言之，数字时代及其“技术”，在艺术家这里，似乎还缺乏一种本真的出发点，一种将其与更驳杂的经验勾连起来的紧迫性。
This is a familiar sensation when viewing much contemporary painting that engages with “technology”. Digital imagery and new visual technologies have come to seen as a question for painting today. Yet artists often seem to approach, a thin barrier seems to remain. While their works’ relationship to technology may be clear, what is their relation to the artist’s own lived experience? And to the audience? In other words, artists seem to lack an authentic starting point for engaging with the digital age and technologies—an urgency that would connect them to a more varied and complex field of experience.
莫少龙找到了这样的紧迫性吗？在去年的这批新作中，他更像是从那一狭窄的问题域中退了出来：其笼罩在噪点状的细密痕迹下的人物带有一种隐秘的叙事感，而由于那种“点刷”式的画法在一层层的覆盖后已变得十分融洽，连人物的背景此时也仿佛处在了与他们同一颜色的细雨当中。同时，一些重影、画面撕裂、卡顿一般的形状也附着在了人物身上，其中最特别的，是《阿诺》《罪犯》等作品中，那些仿若“水蛭”般的深色形状，如果说在此前作品中，莫少龙对其人物的那种数字化的扭曲还有些突兀的话，那么，这些“水蛭”带来的却是一种“更加现实”的感受：人物正在被他们所身处的历史/时空啃噬。
Has Mo found it? In last year’s new works, he steps back from these narrow concerns. Beneath dense, noise‑like brush marks, his figures suggest a latent narrative. Built up through successive overlapping layers of this stippling‑brushing technique, even the backgrounds appear enveloped in fine rain tinted with the same hues as the figures. Ghosting, image‑tearing and stuttering forms cling to the human subjects. Most striking are the dark, leech‑shaped forms in works such as Arnold and Criminal. Whereas digital distortions in his earlier paintings felt somewhat abrupt, these “leeches” produce a feeling of something more real: the figures being gnawed away by the history and time‑space they inhabit.
这带来了一种相当奇特的效果：那些来自电视、录像带、胶片等“旧视觉媒介”的视觉元素，此时成为了肖像人物所处时空的物质基础。可以说，画面内，莫少龙为自己“文化战争”的记忆搭建起了一个完整的世界，而在画面外，他又将自己在两个时代感受到的视觉经验的差异上升（或者说“发挥”也不为过）了一种历史秩序，最终引发了一种年代交错，虚虚实实的恍惚之感。
This produces a peculiar effect. Visual elements drawn from older media — television, videotape and film stock — become the material foundation of the time‑space inhabited by his portrait subjects. Within the frame, Mo constructs a fully‑realised world for his memories of that “cultural‑warfare” era. Beyond the canvas, he elevates the differences between his visual experiences of two eras into a historical order, —or even, one might say, imaginatively develops them into one, ultimately producing a sense of disorientation in which different eras overlap, and the real and the unreal become difficult to distinguish.
《⻉⻉》，2026，布⾯油彩，30x40cm（左）
《罪犯2》，2025，布面油彩，30x40cm（右）
《罪犯2》，2025，布面油彩，30x40cm（右）
莫少龙最终找到一种将其绘画上的进展，自己对时代的感知都妥善安置的方式。但也正如这些画面大多具有的那种稀薄的质感一样，我们都能感到这一方式（肖像、绘画、个体的记忆）在当下的脆弱性。一位笔者与莫少龙共同相识的艺术家曾发出疑问：“你认为他为什么一直画肖像？”对大多数的艺术家而言，这一问题的答案或许是“没有为什么。”反倒是莫少龙，在看过这批肖像之后，人们会期待他说出一些言犹未尽的人和事。
Mo has finally arrived at a way to accommodate both the developments in his painting and his sense of the times. Still, much like the thin, almost insubstantial quality of these paintings, one senses the fragility of this approach — portraiture, painting and individual memory — in current moment. A friend, also an artist, once posed a question about Mo: “Why do you think he keeps painting portraits?” For most artists, the answer might simply be “no reason”. After viewing these portraits, however, one expects to hear more from Mo about some people and stories have yet to be fully told.
图片鸣谢：洞-当代艺术平台
艺术家 Artist
“莫少⻰的绘画对图像的选择透露主观性，其⻛格化的笔触，缅怀式的用色展现了一个具有时间跨度的社会边缘。在艺术家看来，人物和讯息、主题和背景在不断的更新中共同影响着图像与日常的构建。作品不去还原叙事，而是记录和唤醒联系。”
个展有：“双击绘画”，洞-当代艺术中心，上海，2026；“黑客，伤员，乞丐，信徒”，没顶画廊，上海，2023；“灵性政客”，Jack Bell Gallery，伦敦，英国，2022。
笔者 Author
唐鎏，现⼯作⽣活于上海，Art-ba-ba编辑、写作者。作品⻅于《Art-ba-ba》《上海⽂学》《我们》等刊物。