Bifurcate boughs with human heads, cheerfully smiling, assembled to monumental groups, or smaller exemplars beaded to chains. Bodies of grubs or lady bugs combined with baby fat legs and chubby human faces. Similar heads poke out of pea pods or are hanging on strings. Or they are growing in pillowy cocoons waiting for their metamorphosis, their rebirth: Shencheng Xu's sculptural work and installations have one facet in common: They are hybrids.

They are crossbreeds regarding more than one level: Xu uses a variety of organic and synthetic materials for his sculptures and employs traditional techniques to address contemporary issues. Wood, resin and steel are combined to synthesis of preliminarily separated domains, technique comparable to the making of his polymorphic creatures. He generates chimerical figures, produces the missing link between plant and animal kingdom and man, reality and fantastic fiction. Chimerical figures are rooted in mythology of every culture. They belong to the intermediate world, the realm where the spirit feels the breath of bliss of Paradise or the punishment of hell. They are human constructions and visualize (human) traits of ravenousness, greed and lust in exaggerated way. As threatening opposite to culture and civilisation, they had to be fought throughout the centuries. Xu refers to the mythical meaning of these creatures and their ambiguity. He gives them further significations: Cuteness, irony, a funny perspective, or alarming notions.

In THE GARDEN OF EDEN, Xu's installation presented in the current exhibition at Gallery UNO, another chimera snakes, floats through a coppice. The snake, chthonic reptile, is lifted in the airy sphere through the strings clamped to her back. A huge chain along her backside refers to her bendable spine, visible reference to the flexibility of her body. The worm-like creature is provided with a human head. Bald, with small eyes and an oversized mouth, it is heading for nourishment. With pursed lips, the red tongue is peering, groping, tasting through the bushes. These are endowed with anthropomorphic lineaments: Hands instead of leaves, tiny heads instead of buds in a web of stipes. This scenery seems like taken out, like a detail from the horrible ado on Hieronymus Bosch's tableau The Garden of Earthly Delights painted around 1504. The infiltration of sin into mankind is drastically depicted. We knew and know: The return to Paradise will remain utopian desire for mankind.

Shencheng Xu received his MFA in Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art's Rinehart School of Sculpture in 2001. The same year, he received "Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award" from International Sculpture Center. His BFA in Sculpture was received from Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, China in 1993. In China he completed over a dozen monumental sculptures. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions both in United States and in China. His works were published in "Sculpture" and several other art periodicals. Right now he is an assistant professor of sculpture in Northeastern Illinois University.

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