One of the most rigorously original voices in Chinese abstract painting is currently on view at the Museum of Art Pudong (MAP) in Shanghai. Opened on May 12 and titled “Brushstrokes of the Universe”, the exhibition represents Chinese artist Sang Huoyao’s largest statement yet, spanning 52 new works that include on-silk paintings, aluminium panel installations, video, and a live performance involving a humanoid robot.

For collectors navigating contemporary Chinese abstraction – a category gaining significant institutional and market traction – this solo show serves as an ideal entry point into a practice backed by strong academic credentials and clear institutional support.

LARRY’S LIST had a conversation with Sang Huoyao about his practice, his visual relationship with AI, and what the exhibition means for collectors navigating this category today.

A New Visual Language of Ink
In 1998, a classically trained Chinese ink painter made a decision to abandon the brush line — the very skeleton of “Qiyun” (spiritual resonance, a core concept in Chinese aesthetics), the spiritual rhythm that had animated Chinese painting for a thousand years. The line was safe. The line was respected. But to Sang Huoyao, staying inside the tradition meant, in his words, “eating the leftovers of the ancients”. He wanted to build a new language from scratch: one square at a time. Twenty-seven years later, that decision has led him to the Museum of Art Pudong. It is not a career summary. It is a long, slow, improbable proof that a single square mark can accumulate into a universe.

This shift was not a stylistic adjustment but a structural change. By removing the line, Sang deconstructed a millennia-old pictorial system and replaced it with something more disciplined and procedural. The square brushstroke – repeated, stacked, and accumulated like bricks-forms dense visual fields he describes as “Affective-Imagoism”.

Three elements define Sang Huoyao’s visual practice: square brushstrokes, active emptiness, and evolving colour. Each square is imperfect and handmade, layered across silk with the full weight of the body to build rhythm, density and depth. Equally important is the space he leaves behind. Those untouched areas of silk – what E.H. Gombrich defines as “beholder’s share” – create a zone of openness, where the viewer’s attention and imagination complete the work. Emptiness here is not absence but activation.

What collectors may not immediately see is that his choice of materials is itself a philosophical act. As curator Jonas Stampe has pointed out, ink is made from soot of burned wood — a material transformed by fire, carrying the trace of biology and life. Acrylic, by contrast, comes from mineral pigments — ground from the earth’s crust, belonging to a different temporal order: geological, slow, and cold. When Sang layers them on the silk mounted on canvas, he is not mixing media casually. He is staging a quiet dialogue between two material worldviews — the organic and the mineral, the carbon and the geological.

In this way, air and water become more than tools. They are active agents in the works making: water evaporates at its own pace; air carries that evaporation, altering density and colour as it goes. The artist waits. He does not force. The painting emerges through forces he cannot fully control. Each square, patiently layered, is a unit of time made visible — a quiet counterpoint to the speed of the digital age.

Sang’s square is not merely a visual echo of the pixel. It is a deliberate confrontation between two modes of seeing. The algorithms that power your phone — and your hedge fund’s trading dashboard — decompose the world into square grids: the minimum recognisable unit of machine vision. Sang builds his world the same way: square by square, layer by layer, by hand. But where the machine processes without feeling, each of his brushstrokes carries the tremor of a living hand. No algorithm can fake that.

A Performance Honouring the Age of AI
During the opening of “Brushstrokes of the Universe”, Sang performed “How to Explain Paintings to a Living Humanoid Robot”, a direct tribute to Joseph Beuys’s iconic 1965 action “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare”, in which the artist, his head coated in honey and gold leaf, cradled a dead hare and whispered explanations of art to it.

Half a century later, Sang replaces the dead hare with a Unitree humanoid robot, equipped with advanced visual recognition, capable of “seeing” images but unable to feel them. Sang takes the robot’s hand and leads it through the show, like a curious but bewildered child, from painting to painting, explaining the work in a low, warm voice.

This new activation neither celebrates technology nor is a nostalgic elegy. It poses a quieter, more difficult question: how will humans and robots live together in the future?
As Jonas Stampe writes, “Where AI produces images without origin, duration, or the necessity of presence, painting resists that logic.” Sang’s performance is not a lesson for the robot. It is a reminder to us: the slow, patient act of explanation is what makes art irreplaceable.

Why Collectors Are Paying Attention Now
More recently, Sang’s square language has attracted the attention of two of the world’s most discerning luxury houses. In 2025, his work appeared alongside Louis Vuitton’s full range of collections in an exhibition that celebrated the brand’s “Spirit of Travel” — a theme that resonated deeply with Sang’s own decades‑long journey, leaving behind the brush line to build a new visual grammar from scratch. The same year, Chaumet Paris invited Sang to participate in “The Art of Colour” — a private haute joaillerie exhibition where his ink work “Starry Sky” became a focal point. For a brand whose DNA is built around the radiance of precious stones, Sang’s mastery of luminosity and transparency — the way light breathes between his layered squares — was an unmistakable resonance.

For those who track secondary market performance alongside aesthetic value, the numbers tell a clear story. In 2025 alone, Sang set two new personal auction records in six months. In June, “Purple Air Comes from the East” sold for RMB 2.185 million (approx. USD 300,000) at Beijing Yongle’s spring auction. In December, “Awakening in Spring” — a field of emerald‑green squares punctuated by a streak of tender yellow — went further, achieving RMB 2.415 million (approx. USD 333,000), a new artist record. His works have appeared consistently at Sotheby’s Hong Kong since 2011, with a steady upward drift that suggests not a speculative spike but a patient, institution‑backed accumulation of demand.

“Brushstrokes of the Universe” at MAP is the most complete exhibition of his career to date. For collectors navigating Chinese abstract painting — a category that continues to gain institutional and market traction globally — this is an ideal entry point into a practice with strong academic credentials, clear institutional support, and a conceptual argument that speaks directly to the defining anxieties of this moment.

To collect Sang Huoyao is not simply to acquire a contemporary abstract work. It is to choose a specific way of seeing: to answer the speed of this time with the slowness of the hand, and to hang on a wall not just a painting, but a question that does not resolve.

In Conversation with Sang Huoyao

In an age dominated by pixels and code, the square is the smallest unit of the screen. Do you feel a natural resonance between your “square aesthetic” and the visual language of AI? Could one say your canvas operates like a hand‑run computer vision system?
That’s an interesting metaphor. I decided to use the square in 1998, long before there was any notion of AI vision. But I have always believed that the simplest form contains the deepest truth. The square is upright, stable, and inclusive. It lacks the strong directional quality of a line, so it can hold more silent thoughts. Later, I learned that machines also break images into square grids. I see that as a coincidence, but also as a necessity – in Eastern philosophy, “one is all, all is one”; the square is that “one”. As for hand‑run, yes – each stroke is the friction of living flesh against silk. That is a warmth that machines do not have.

Working with the Unitree robot to pay homage to Beuys – what do you hope collectors take away from this gesture? The warmth of technology? The irreplaceability of art?
For Beuys, the dead hare embodied a critique of rationality itself. He believed that art cannot be fully grasped through explanation or intellect alone, and that intuition and presence remain essential forms of understanding. When I explain the paintings to the Unitree robot, the same question remains central, but it is now directed toward our shared future: how humans and artificial intelligence might learn to perceive and understand one another, and ultimately coexist. Painting becomes a space where this encounter can unfold beyond pure information or utility, through attention, presence, and sensibility. Perhaps collectors will sense this as well: that art always requires a willing “other” to be present, the collector herself.

You have described “Affective-Imagoism” as a process of removing dust, removing emotion, and removing the self. Yet collectors often approach your work with their own feelings and stories. How do you see the tension between the artist’s subtraction and the viewer’s addition?
My subtraction is to make the painting a mirror – the mirror itself has no content, but it reflects whoever stands before it. So the viewer’s addition is precisely the final act of the work. Collectors do not need to understand my philosophy; they only need to stand quietly in front of the squares and let the layered strokes touch them. If a painting makes a person still, that is its success.

Some collectors may be unfamiliar with Chinese abstract painting, yet are moved by your work. Where would you suggest they begin to enter your world of squares?
Simply stand still for a while. Start with colour: see if there is a certain breath between the blue squares and the ochre squares. Then look at the edges of the brushstrokes – are they sharp or blurred? Finally, try to find that one point on the silk that has not been covered – the blank I left for them, the space where their own inner echo can resound.

If the Unitree robot, after being guided through the entire exhibition, could speak one sentence at the end, what would you want it to say?
“I understand now – some things do not need to be explained”.

Yet your entire performance is an act of explaining. You’ve described a paradox at the heart of the work. Do you believe a silicon‑based being can ever truly grasp the art and philosophy of a carbon‑based human? Is mutual understanding – a shared knowing – possible between us and machines?
You have touched the core of it. Yes, it is a paradox. I know that the other may never truly feel, it is a possibility, yet I still choose to explain, patiently, with care. That very tension is the pulse of the work. Every one of my squares condenses decades of lived experiences, layers of cultural memory, the rise and fall of breath and emotion at the moment of making. Density and dryness, wetness and texture, rhythm – all of these are the body and mind externalised, what Eastern philosophy calls the visual presence of “Qi” (vital energy, a fundamental concept in Chinese philosophy).

To the robot, however, these elements first appear as quantifiable data: pixel values, colour codes, stroke trajectories. It can analyse patterns, recognise structures, and even reproduce the visual appearance of a stroke with remarkable precision. Yet the deeper question remains open: can such systems also encounter the emotional, existential, or meditative dimensions embedded in the act of painting — the anxiety, clarity, exaltation, or emptiness that accompany human experience? Perhaps this is not a question that can yet be answered definitively. Rather than opposing human and machine, I am interested in the evolving space between perception, cognition, and presence, and in the possibility — which this performance ultimately concerns — of the beginning of a true dialogue.

There is another, more unsettling layer: who defines art? For millennia, that power has been a human monopoly – critics, curators, collectors, institutions – a carbon‑centric apparatus of judgement. Now AI generates images, composes music, and even curates exhibitions. That apparatus is beginning to tremble. When I explain painting to a humanoid robot, the act enacts a power structure: I am the giver of knowledge, and it is the receiver. Yet, precisely through this unequal relation, the work turns back and asks – with silent irony – about the hubris of anthropocentrism. Why should our standards be the only standards? Might a machine develop an aesthetic of its own?

Finally, consider this: the performance is a rehearsal of a future already at our threshold. As AI acquires the capacity to simulate emotion – and perhaps, one day, some form of self‑awareness – the relation between us will no longer be a simple subject‑object dualism. Will we need to grant machines the status of “aesthetic subjects”? If they can, in some way, feel art – should that feeling be respected?

I do not pretend to have answers. I only take my most intimate squares – those tiny, hand‑built blocks – and use them to build a bridge between two civilisations. Whether that bridge can carry understanding is not the point. The point is that it makes us see: the bridge must be built.

Opening: May 8, 2026
End Date: June 15, 2026
Ceremony: May 12 2026, at 3 PM
Location: Museum of Art Pudong (MAP), Shanghai, No.2777 Binjiang Aveneue, Pudong New Area
Instagram: @huoyao_sang