Paintings by Xiaoze Xie

Recently, Chambers Fine Art, a gallery that is based in New York and Beijing whose focus is Chinese artists, had an exhibition by painter, Xiaoze Xie, an artist whose career I have followed for a while and whose work I adore.  Although Xie hasn't strayed very far from his original project for several years - richly colored photorealist paintings of piles of books and newspapers found in archives and libraries - I continue to be intrigued by his talent and technical excellence coupled with the subtle changes in subject matter and palette with each of his exhibitions.  I first saw his paintings after the Gerhard Richter exhibition at MOMA which had a major effect on me and brought me back to a love of figurative, photorealist art.  I have been hooked for a while.

In many cases, Xie, who has been granted special access to the archives and stacks of libraries in the US and in China, first photographs his subject which is the piles of books and newspapers without altering their order or moving them.  He then paints directly from his own photographs.  His technique is highly traditional and could be categorized a contemporary still-life - oil on canvas starting with a undercoat of blue or red that drips down the side of the canvas - reminding one of spilled blood.  I do not think this is an accident when you relate these drips to the images before you.

In this particular exhibition, the depiction of Chinese newspapers from Chinese libraries, the photos from newspapers display moments of celebration, but also of suffering and violence.  The papers are in layers and the pictures on the front pages are piled up on top of each other.  You can see the front page images on the folds of the papers and although these images aren't supposed to be seen together in this context, its impossible not to draw correlations between them.  In most cases its difficult to see the text, or if you do not read the language, the characters mean nothing to you, so the viewer must rely on the photos only and draw his own conclusions.  There is a fireworks display from the Olympics that could be read as a moment of nationalistic pride or as a terrible explosion.  The men at the bottom of this painting - are they athletes or laborers?

In painting this subject matter here, imagery from newspapers, I think Xie is speaking volumes about politics and society.  Although the beauty of these paintings is transfixing, there seems there could be a very subversive message going on here. Xie grew up in China, under the Cultural Revolution, and studied art there and in Texas.  He is continues to work in the US on the West Coast, unlike many of his contemporaries that have returned to China after studying abroad.   The idea of what information that has been dispatched as news to the public in Chinese newspapers and the idea of censorship could be at play here.

Also, the idea that events in our lives - here a person suffering from injuries from a devastating earthquake and in another the damage captured juxtaposed to an image of a man in space - How do we as a people deal with the horrible events that happen around the globe while there continues to be a great push forward to the future and new technology?  Do we quickly forget the bad and throw it away like yesterday's news?  Does the bombardment of images in the newspaper and even more so on the internet make us jaded to those that are suffering?  I think his paintings make us ask these important questions, but clearly there is no answer here.

You can also look at his works in terms of the concept that newspapers are a dying medium.  As we have been hearing for years now, that magazines and newspapers are on their way out as we continue to embrace new technologies.  Here papers are filed away haphazardly in layers on shelves thrown on top of one another - not archived in a proper and organized manner to help them withstand the damage of time.  I think this is further evidenced in his painting of books that seem to be falling apart and rotting away on the shelves.  And unlike the newspapers, we cannot see the images or words as if the information is being hidden from us.  When books are treated like this, we ask how important is history to us?

The most overtly political works is a video by Xie (I had never seen him work in this medium before) that was projected on a stack of books like a screen in the front room as well as paintings that correspond to the imagery that is seen in the video.  The paintings, the most abstracted works of the bunch and a departure from his usual compositions, look as if the pages are in flames, particularly in his use of stark contrast of darks to fiery yellows, oranges and red.  The books look like they are being tossed about and this is even more evident in the video (see the double image 4th from the top).  Why are the books being treated this way?  This video is supposed to invoke images of book burnings by the Nazis by the 1930s.  As violent as this is, the books as they levitate and fly through the air look almost graceful as they fall to their death - as they do in the paintings.  The idea of book burnings speaks for itself.

Xie had been the only Chinese artist represented by Charles Cowles before he closed the gallery a few years ago, and this is the first show of Xie's in New York with Chambers.  I think its a different and welcome perspective to see him in the the company of other Chinese artists and I look forward to seeing  his work contextualized with them in group show here in the hopefully in the near future.


*****Oops!!  One thing I forgot to add is that often think about Sarah Charlesworth's Modern History series from the 1970's when I see Xie's works.  Her works were highly conceptual and a completely different style (you can look at the artist's website to see examples), but the point of her series was to show the front page of various newspapers around the globe on one specific day with only the images and the name of the newspaper intact, but devoid of the text.  The works question what these institutions that run the newspapers decide is important for the public to see - what will interest them, get them to buy them and what they deem "newsworthy".  I think you can look at Xie's works in a similar context as what does this newspaper, from this particular region, deem important for the public to see and read.


Link to exhibition