In After Art, the art historian David Joselit offered a concise—the book is a mere 136 pages—theory of art after art: conceptual propositions toward imagining art freed from well-worn conventions around artistic production and reception, nation-state origins, and medium specificity. An art history of the future, as it were. In “After Image,” John Shen’s solo debut at Brookline’s Praise Shadows Art Gallery, the artist accomplishes something similar. Across nine conceptually rigorous works spanning photography, installation, and time-based media, Shen imagines photography after photography, the modifier of the exhibition’s title gesturing—Januslike—toward Eurocentric histories of photography as technological and cultural practice, and speculations on image-making freed from photography’s emergence within imperial and colonial contexts...
