Chinese artist Xie Qi’s latest exhibition, “The Unbearable Weight of Things,” has opened at comes to Hong Kong’s Pékin Fine Arts.Her second solo exhibition run by the gallery, and first in HK, “Unbearable Weight” sees the artist working in portrait, still life and landscape. All of the works are united, however, by her painting style. Painting in many layers with a dark color palette, the works feel visually heavy before even considering the implications of the exhibition’s title.In an artist’s statement, “Things Weigh Us Down, We Weigh Things Down,” 2016, released to coincide with the exhibition, Xie discusses what it is about things she finds so troubling; “The heavenly enjoyment of our things can gloss over the hell of other people. Our things carve out an endless, safe distance between people, a distance that fills the extra space in our lives...as time passes and as our things accumulate, we begin to hear the incessant clamor of our things, in our most intimate spaces.” She then goes on to call the accumulation of objects “futile attempts at filling a void.”These sentiments can particularly be seen in the still lives in the exhibition. Painting common objects like walnuts and peaches in larger-than-life sizes and in unfamiliar colors, Xie makes the familiar strange. In a work like “Walnut,” 2015, a previously benign object is given a sinister presence, seeming to loom over the gallery visitor, with its tones of black and red suggesting doom and disease.In other works, Xie paints portraits of money in works featuring the designs and emblems the artist found on various denominations of Yuan; still lives that are also both portraits and landscapes. In a painting like “￥10 Reverse Side,” 2012, what initially seems like a mountain scene familiar from Chinese art history slowly unveils itself as just another object, something preventing us from appreciating the natural world.Even the portraits in the exhibition are full of this unbearable weight. As Xie notes in her statement, “people depicted in portraits halt their speech and their actions. The acts of gazing are obscured, layer-by-layer, by the artist’s brush strokes, and their humanity is also transformed into a static thing, frozen in time.”“Xie Qi: The Unbearable Weight of Things” runs March 19-May 21 at Pékin Fine Arts Hong Kong.
↧