Xiaze Xie

Xiaze Xie is a painter that received a background in architecture studying in Beijing. But upon exiting school, he switched his interests over to painting, retreating and travelling into the mountain areas to tour and sketch. These earliest works were very gestural drawings in pencil and expressed his longing for "freedom after [the long] rigidity of lines" he had been subject to during architecture schooling.
In 1993 he began engaging in long walks through narrow library aisles and photographing stacks of Chinese books. He then painted from these photographs, including such details as the labels left by librarians which served as traces of their organizational systems. These images are rendered in a very painterly fashion, with loosely flowing horizontal lines that fall apart the closer you get to the painting. These are large in scale averaging 60 x 90 inches, allowing the viewer to follow the horizontal lines of the painted pages.
Xie's practice moved from paintings of horizontally stacked Chinese books and newspapers to large scale installations influenced by turn of the century cultural revolutions such as the Tiananmen Square revolt in 1989 or Nazi Germany book burnings. Xie himself participated as a student and was deeply influenced by these movements and specifically Mao's impact on Chinese politics. His interest in these happenings appears in one of his larger installations where a large photograph of a library from the 1960s is mounted along a wall while red metal squares punctuate the space. These squares connote order and structure and reference Mao's red book which at the time was the only book that was safe to own.
His interest in politics, transience, memory, and knowledge then began to manifest itself in a series of paintings centered on archival newspapers. Xie was attracted to their thin, transparent, veil-like qualities, as well as their function as disseminators of information. The first paintings in the series blurred and unfocused which is demonstrated by loose patterns of dots and lines created by his rendering of the text. However, by 2001, the images sharpened with more painted close-ups where the importance of content - text, sequences in time, and printed images- became more distinct. He expanded his color palette from just the communist red in his earlier work to create full-color, photo-realist paintings. The natural stacking and folding of the newspapers prevent the news photographs from being fully disclosed, which mirrors the way the media can censor, skew, and serve to keep the viewer in the dark. Furthermore, this series can maybe be seen as a play on the idea of composing a still life; Xie is painting images of photographs in newspapers which are already depictions of something immobile, separate, and distant.
In Xie’s more recent work, he begins to depart from the rigidity of the photo-realist painting and more into a gestural form of illustration using rice paper and Chinese paint. His subject matter has also moved towards a fascination with politicians and their facial expressions during moments of debate and intense decision-making. Inspired by the idea that “history only recalls a few great deeds and the rest falls into silence,” Xie seems to be exploring the aura, power, and maybe even corruption surrounding politicians. These works are very reflective, textural, and less photographic; products of his experimentation with new techniques and materials. There is a transparent quality to the imagery which mimics the “veil-like” character of newspapers.
Xie’s talk ended with a brief mention and preview of his future works, which include paintings that specifically exhibit the transparent quality of newsprint and the overlapping of images through that thin membrane of paper. A video serving more as a study showed the source of his inspiration through captured moments of New Yorkers on the El train crammed together, reading newspapers. Instants where the sun shined through the newspapers triggered direct visual associations with Xie’s work and helped inform his practice.
To me, the video served as a breakthrough during this presentation. While thinking about his paintings of newspapers, books, and book burnings, I felt as though he constructed a lot of his imagery on almost arbitrary aesthetic criteria. When I asked how he chose his source material, he talked a lot about lighting and wanting to paint things that were beautiful. I wanted to challenge that a little bit, since I knew he was interested in how the images in newspapers were commentaries on social policies, war, suffering, and politics, and yet it felt like his selection process was still based on what was formally most “beautiful.” I feel as though there is nothing shocking, surprising, or unexpected about a sequence of events in newspapers; they naturally make sense because they are sequential in occurrence, and are most likely archived that way as well. The reason why the video was refreshing was because it was examining a bit more of this process of layering and movement which I thought more transformative than stagnant stacks of old news. I would like to see what he could do with more current and present news rather than studies of the past. Although, that being said, once something is printed, published, and archived, does it even exist in the present anymore?