Three Shadows +3 Gallery is honored to host Liang Xiu's first solo exhibition, Something to Nothing. Liang won the Three Shadows Photography Award in 2017. Liang Xiu’s work offers up the body of the artist and the gaze of the artist at once: “a burning fire at the fringes of a society which is at once the most powerful political economy in the world, and yet continues to encounter essential challenges around equality, sexuality and artistic identity, both in its present and recent past.” Liang Xiu began her work as a photographer with the series Fringe of Society. She picked up a camera and started to take photos purely out of instinct, focusing on society’s abandoned and marginalized. She pursued light through darkness. "I grew up on the margins of society,” she says. “I suffered inside them. Now I'm their diplomat." Photography can be seen here as a means of self-examination and self-help.

The power in Liang Xiu’s work derives from her constant pain and the self-redemption caused by confronting this reality. She attempts to come to peace with the outside world through photography. Following from the unconscious, instinctive production of the images in Fringe of Society and Fire Like Me, she gradually turned to a more conscious mode of expressing her ideas. Nothingness emerged. She based the workon the city she lived in, weaving together her personal creations, photoarchives, and text files, constructing a complete system of thinking. In Nothingness, Liang Xiu sketched out a system of how to break away from “Bitterness.” Contemplating the root cause of“Bitterness,” Liang Xiu points out that the “Eight Bitternesses” comes from the“Five Connotations,” and the direct cause of “Bitterness” stems from “the bias caused by ‘ways of seeing’(我执加于相上的分别心)”. The bias inherent in perception is abstract and fluid, enabling “Bitterness” and “Joy” to transform into one another. Liang Xiu uses these characteristics to study whether it is possible to get rid of bitterness and to study its cost. Reflecting on her own experience, she arrived at the conclusion that it is possible to pull oneself away from suffering. However, that only means that one is separated from the external pain, or in other words, one’s pain is detached from the individual experience. It doesn’t go away, however. It is elevated to the level that the subject is forced to face the emptiness and the suffering of life and death that may be shared by almost all human beings. This kind of suffering is there once one is born, and it passes along to other beings endlessly.