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Art

Art by Gary Sheng. Each series iterates on a single theme.

Golden-hour courtyard at a beautiful compound: a long wooden table still set with plates and juice glasses while a joyful, mostly Black and visibly mixed group of young people is up dancing around it, sunlight flaring through the trees, a brass North Star Cross with a long bottom point mounted on the stone wall behind them.

Abbapiano

The first Abbapiano album. Amapiano is the catchiest thing you can put on in the background, and the point of Abbapiano is simple: make it easy to glorify God while dancing to catchy African sounds. The daily declarations, over jungle house and log-drum grooves. The art is Afrochristofuturism, and its point is the best possible future for Africa and the diaspora. Each track’s art is a woven pattern organized around the Cross, one pattern per declaration.

16 pieces
An immense ornately-paneled dark gate fills a wall of night, its two doors open just a crack; a narrow blade of warm gold light breaks through the widening gap from top to bottom and lands precisely on one small figure standing before the gate, casting long shadows across the dark stone ground.

The Lord’s House Declares

An album. These are declarations I actually say every day, inspired by Apostle Delmar, set over house grooves as an experiment: mostly tech house, some melodic house. Each track is one line of Scripture said in first person and repeated until it stops being words you are saying and starts being something you believe. The club has been discipling people with repetition for decades; this just changes what gets repeated.

7 pieces
A tiny silhouetted figure walks a lit path across a dark rocky plain toward a horizon flooded with golden light; rays fan upward into a starry navy sky, and the path glows gold ahead of the walker.

You Won’t Let Me Down

An album. Seven anthems in the Illenium lane, each one sung TO God rather than about Him, in a voice barely above a whisper set against drops built for a festival field. The art holds the same argument the music makes: one small person, and a light that arrives from outside them and does not run out.

7 pieces
A painted night landscape in navy and gold: a radiant four-pointed star over layered mountain ridges, monumental baobab silhouettes, and a tiny rim-lit figure walking the near ground.

Living Dioramas

Three living dioramas played as one album, one argument in three movements: the heavens declare the glory, the light is received in a dark room, and a city set on a hill shines it back out. Every scene is painted in layers that move to its own song, under one family law: the sources stay still, the light does the living, and the ground never shakes, because somebody is standing on it. These ones move; click through and press play.

3 pieces
A three-dimensional night cosmos of glowing particles: a dome of stars over a dark breathing sea, a golden sun and pale moon, a small island bearing a figure of warm light, and a four-pointed North Star Cross constellation at the zenith.

And God Said

Creation by declaration, in three dimensions. Genesis 1 is a sequence of commands, and this cosmos executes them to the music: out of a formless deep, light divides from darkness, a firmament of stars arcs overhead, the sea gathers around a risen island, sun and moon ignite, life wheels over the waters, a figure of light stands on the land, and the finished heavens rest with the North Star Cross sealed in the stars. What is created stays created; the drum sends waves of brightness, never motion. This one moves; click through and speak it into being.

One piece
A dark navy canvas where an umbrella made entirely of tiny declaration text sheds falling grey words like you’re not enough and give up, with a handle spelling The Lord is my shepherd.

Protection

The oldest piece here, and the argument underneath all the albums: the enemy’s words fall like rain, and the covering is woven from daily declarations. Hand-coded in canvas, and it has been raining ever since. This one moves; click through and stand under it.

One piece
Oil painting in deep near-black. Towering walls of driving rain and black water rear up on both sides of a narrow corridor and curve overhead, leaving a parted channel down the middle. A woman walks away from the viewer along it, seen from behind and slightly to the side, mid-stride and barefoot on dry ground, in the same terracotta dress and oatmeal wrap. Her hair and clothes are completely dry and a warm golden light rests on her. A single small upright flame of gold light, no larger than a fist and with no face or body, hovers in the air ahead of her and lights the path.

Through the Waters

Somebody is handed the thing that ends their life as they have it, on an ordinary weekday, and takes it standing up. Then the same person, the same day, the same clothes, walks straight into the storm it became. It opens around them and they cross on dry ground, untouched, following a small flame that is not theirs.

6 pieces
Anime illustration, close and low. A Black and East Asian man fills the left of the frame, mouth open mid-shout, shouldering a translucent rifle made of golden light. From its muzzle an enormous blast of gold fills the right half of the frame, carrying the letters GET OUT into a disintegrating shadow-mass.

nightshift

A man does spiritual warfare the way a tradesman does call-outs: at night, competently, without spectacle. His weapon is a declaration spoken out loud. The demons panic; he does not.

18 pieces
A four-panel comic. First, a close-up of a scraggly Japanese man weeping in a dark stone cell, chains and a padlock behind his head. Second, his phone on a tripod, its screen showing that same crying face livestreamed with viewer comments reading PRAYING FOR YOU, SO STRONG and GOD BLESS, and hearts streaming up the edge. Third, a wide pull-back: he sits on the floor against the chained gate filming himself, calm and satisfied now, as hearts and thumbs-up icons flood the bars behind him. Fourth, seen over his shoulder, a second door stands wide open with warm light and a green field beyond it, a glowing golden figure of Jesus stepping through with a speech bubble reading BRO. YOU’RE NOT JOB., while the phone screen still broadcasts the man’s face, now caught wide-eyed in shock.

suffermaxxing

One picture, about performing your own pain. The man in it is not a liar. The grief is real and the audience is kind, and that is the trap: the applause pays better than the exit.

One piece
A crayon comic strip. Two friends set off together up a hill. In the middle panels one strains to drag a huge wooden plow up a steep slope under a storm cloud while the other rides a wave of golden light, laughing. In the last panel the surfer stands beside a mountain of harvest and the plow-dragger beside a single small carrot, staring with a question mark over his head.

favormaxxing

Everyone is optimising something. This is a series about the one lever that is not effort: stepping into the assignment God actually gave you, and out-producing your own striving.

4 pieces

More series as they hold together.