Lv Shanchuan uses images from the news to look into the connections between different social incidents and investigate the political and social ideologies that shape different relationships within today’s societies. Layer by layer, the artist reinterprets news of the past and present with thick paint on the canvases. When viewed up close, the paintings give a sense of chaos. Yet when the viewer steps back and looks at them from afar, there is remarkable reasoning and order behind all this apparent disorder, and this reasoning and order are the core drivers of the paintings.
Renowned Chinese art critic He Guiyan commented that Lv neither directly copies images from the news nor recreates them in a simple manner. On the contrary, he decodes and reorganises them, and in the process, he shows his subjective views and, more importantly, isolates these visual images and recreates them into new social landscapes. In He’s views, “Lv in fact transformed the contents of the news images into certain kinds of spectacles, and scenes which deliver certain meanings in sociology terms.”