In 1981, in Shanghai, the Chinese artist Shen Chen went to a survey covering 200 years of American art and saw Number 10, a 1949 painting by Jackson Pollock. The fall of Mao had happened just a few years earlier. Western art in China was still a rarity, and abstract art an impossibility. The paintings by American color field artists, well, their work lit up Shen’s world. “I wanted to make something different from what we were taught to do, something more original, but I didn’t know what, I didn’t know how,” he has explained. Shen moved to the U.S. seven years later, in 1988, and began creating his own abstract works. He now lives between Shanghai and New York, and his work moves in a realm he refers to as “beyond abstraction.” This exhibition presents 12 luminous canvases, their fields of tranfused color a testament to Shen’s evolution. —E.C.