Shen Shaomin
Withdrawn from the fish market 退出市场的魚
23 January - 20 February, 2026
Withdrawn from the Fish Market presents an abundant fish stall selling numerous carp. In China, the homeland of artist Shen Shaomin, the carp is cherished as the national fish. In Chinese confucian philosophy, the carp is celebrated as a figure of perseverance and self-discipline because of its steady swimming upstream against strong currents. It is this perseverance that the carp came to signify confucian values such as lifelong self-cultivation within an ordered social system, privileging endurance and moral refinement over sudden enlightenment. However rich in meaning the carp may be in China, Shaomin observed in Australia this fish is accorded little value.
Decades ago, Chinese carp were introduced in a misguided attempt to improve our rivers' water quality, and strangely, to replicate familiar sceneries and environments for migrants arriving from Europe and Asia. Highly adaptable and extraordinarily fertile, carp populations soon exploded, devastating river ecosystems, particularly within the Murray-Darling Basin. Their presence triggered costly and often futile eradication programs. One such initiative involved microchipping carp and offering cash prizes for their capture, an uncanny attempt to regulate a force already far beyond control.
This strange logic of intervention inspired Shen Shaomin’s long-running series titled Chinese Carp. Produced in large numbers by teams in his studio, each fish is hyper-realistically painted, fitted with glassy eyes, and animated by a small internal mechanism that mimics breathing. Shaomin has shown this body of work numerous times. Just like their living counterparts, Shen wants his carp to migrate, multiply, and infiltrate new environments, appearing in galleries, museums, and art fairs across countries and contexts. In Withdrawn from the Fish Market, this body of work is reconfigured in relation to Sydney’s Fish Market and its relocation to the new market’s site.
The carp has a unique “vacuum-style” method of feeding which stirs up sediments from river and lake beds, increasing water turbidity, and as a result reducing the amount of sunlight being able to penetrate through the water. Shaomin, a master of the uncanny and the poetic metaphor, likens this frenzied stirring of the environment to the experience of migrant populations adjusting to new surroundings, reshaping a place in ways that can be both generative and destructive. By presenting another iteration of Chinese Carp this time in an installation that reflects the Fish Market’s own transition, Shaomin explores the body of work in relation to a commercial context accompanied by a renewed “feeding frenzy” of capital and labour.
Like the species it references, this work is almost parasitic, feeding on each new site it inhabits while generating new meanings in the process. Shown alongside its eventual end as canned food, the carp resurfaces as a dormant metaphor stirred up from the retail floor itself. Withdrawn from the Fish Market invites us to consider how change spreads: how a single decision, species, or structure can ripple outward, reshaping entire systems in ways that are rarely predictable and never neutral.
About The Artist
Shen Shaomin was born in 1956 in Heilongjiang Province, China and initially was acclaimed for his woodblock prints, a technique he had learned outside the formal art academy system. During the 1980s he went to Beijing and became part of the experimental avant-garde. In 1989 he became part of an artistic diaspora who left China and dispersed across the globe: Shen came to Australia where he lived and worked until returning to China in 2001, motivated by the excitement of a growing contemporary art scene and by the availability of materials and labour for his transgressive and ambitious multimedia works. He created a series of still and kinetic sculptures using bonemeal and animal bones sourced from slaughterhouses that question advances in science, biotechnology and genetic engineering.
In 2012, aiming to further develop the cultural relationship between China and Australia he established a residency program in his studio complex outside Beijing, in conjunction with Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Shen Shaomin works across media and forms, from sculpture to painting, from video and installation to performance art. He intends to conclude his ‘bone’ series with an installation made with his own bones after his death.