Zebras, alpacas and cows under chromatic acid: the Chinese artist transforms the gallery into an advertising terrarium, between apparent innocence and carefully measured unease.
Ota Fine Arts Shanghai is dedicating its second solo exhibition with the gallery, and its first in Shanghai, to the Chinese artist Şouada (born in 1987 in Fujian province). Entitled Artificial Paradise , it extends the online viewing room Artificial Nature , which the artist initiated a few years earlier.
Based in Hangzhou for many years, Ouada, a 2011 graduate of the China Academy of Art, has come to perceive nature as suspended between reality and constant aestheticization: a state where the "natural" always bears the mark of manipulation. In the canvases collected for Artificial Paradise , zebras, alpacas, cows, and dogs move within saturated, candy-colored settings. These animals do not represent nature itself; they become landscapes constructed through filtered imagery and digital experimentation.
The exhibition's title deliberately subverts the notion of "paradise." Beneath seemingly playful surfaces, traces of the absurd emerge. Behind these polished and meticulously constructed facades, paradise according to Ouada is anything but a utopian ideal: it gradually reveals its contradictions, its fabricated nature.
¥ouada, On a sunny afternoon in September, I fell asleep in my studio and dreamed of a fuzzy, juicy, soft pink peach, 2025 Acrylic on canvas 70 x 70 cm
For this exhibition, ¥ouada also uses the gallery's three display windows, like so many independent fragments evoking the triad "sky, earth, human". Images and materials are rearranged there, a way for Artificial Paradise to spill out into the street and captivate passersby even before they enter.
Born in 1987 in Fujian and trained at the China Academy of Art, Şouada has for several years been creating a body of work populated by customized animals: bulging muscles, gold chains, oversized eyelashes; drawn from popular internet imagery and fragments of his daily life. Artificial Paradise marks a new stage in this process.
Ota Fine Arts Shanghai
Unit QL106, 1F, No. 78, Huqiu Road, Rockbund, Huangpu District, Shanghai
From June 13 to August 15, 2026
Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–18pm
