Participating Artists: Wang Jie
Exhibition Venue: New Age Gallery（Beijing）
Exhibition Period: 2008.11.8~11.30

The theme of this exhibition, "Lost in the Shade," focuses on the artist's use of "empty garment postures" to create images with a sense of absurdity, emptiness, and a timeless atmosphere. These artworks explore life, soul, spirit, humanity, time, space, and the inevitable tragic fate of human existence. The artist de-emphasizes the concrete and physical body, highlighting the visible state of "empty garments" as a second body, gaining a sense of "body" and "life" in multi-dimensional space-time.

This approach may stem from the philosophical and artistic characteristics of the artist's cultural heritage. Chinese traditional culture values introspection and subjective spirit over external knowledge and the objective world. Consequently, Chinese art focuses on transforming the artist's feelings and understanding into the spirit and life interest, emphasizing expression, spirit transmission, and artistic conception. This contrasts with Western art traditions that prioritize depiction and reproduction of the object.

By concealing the physical body, the empty garment postures still indicate life. Though the physical body is absent, the soul and spirit remain. These empty garments guide viewers through time and space, revealing various states of human existence. The predominant use of black, white, gray, and brown colors creates a strong sense of nihilism and absurdity, enhancing the tragic atmosphere.

These works reflect the individual struggles within contemporary urban society. Each person lives in psychological loneliness, anxiety, and fear of the future. The delicate, shrunken garment postures, with their dancing hands and feet, reveal a desolate estrangement between each other and the viewer. The "scarred from countless tribulations" exterior reflects the "deep pessimism and anxiety" brought by modern society. Perhaps, the self-inflicted tragic destiny of humanity and societal civilization is rooted in this reality.