An Exuberant View
Text/Baodong
Since 2016, Xu Hongxiang’s practice has gradually shifted from experiments with materials, techniques, and images, or say, an aimless, agitated kind of painting imbued with Poor Image, to a painting practice supported by clear motivation and technical foundation. From experiment to practice, the difference is that experiment may be liberating and purposeless, but it is also groundless and escapist; while a practice has to bear a strong sense of mission and orientation, rooting in and based on our empirical reality. In other words, experiment can thrive only within a studio setting, while a practice must be grounded in the reality.
This shift originated from the three “painting practices” from 2016 to 2017—notice that here Xu Hongxiang deliberately picked the word “practice” to describe this phase. In In the Field, Xu Hongxiang displayed his paintings in unconventional settings such as derelict warehouses and massage parlor, locales that represent the environment where he was born and raised. The artist also painted a 9-meter-high large-scale portrait entitled Li Qiang for a childhood friend from his hometown, which he put up on a billboard and displayed outdoor in the very same village Li Qiang lived. These “down to earth” approaches, on one hand, reminds Xu Hongxiang that painting is not only about materials, techniques, and images and that the artist doesn’t exist as an entity that floats beyond all else. On the other hand, his consciousness to establish a concrete practice introduces new contexts and application backdrops into his previous experiments, granting his scattered vocabulary a structural language.
The result of this transformation can be witnessed in the painting Mulian Village. It came from the story of “Doctor Wang,” a bedtime story Xu Hongxiang fabricated for his daughter. At first, the painting acted only as a supplement to the story. However, as the story unfolds and its character developments intensify, this engendered Xu Hongxiang’s experience and imagination towards his hometown, forming a set of “A Dictionary of Maqiao-Esque” polyphonic visual narratives. “Mulian Village,” a commonplace southern Chinese village name; an often “barefoot” Doctor Wang with a shaved head, sporting a white coat alongside a stethoscope; a black dog and a flock of chickens; peach, pear, and orange groves; and a chest of drawers filled with peculiar instruments and toys—all these miscellaneous elements that embodied the artist’s living experience gave form to a set of paintings that can be randomly assembled. This work also combined together Xu Hongxiang’s previous experience in painting, signified especially by its unfinished and process painting aesthetic. In this sense, Mulian Village tells not only a story that grows out of the experience of living in a Chinese reality, but it also showcases the process of development Xu’s painting underwent.
While oriented towards the experience of local reality, Xu Hongxiang’s works after 2016 also march clearly towards the plentitude of painting itself, responding to the vitality of external experience with the inherent visual and physical vitality of painting. In these works, the themes of “landscape” and “viewing”, as well as the motif of characters in the mountain, appear repeatedly, almost constituting a symbolic interconnected relationship within it—where the act of viewing turns nature into a landscape, while the act of viewing itself also transforms into an object of viewing. Here, the artist is no longer a mere spectator, but also a witness being situated within it. At the same time, he is also some sort of entity that operates through a transcendental third-party perspective. On this level, the complicated relationship between humans and landscape in Xu Hongxiang’s works originated within the nexus of reality and experience. He does not offer us a “realistic” conclusion, but instead, reveals the profoundness of reality through the intrinsic profoundness of painting itself. Here, the reality of experience entangles with the reality of painting.
Under the impetus to establish a practice, more experiments are somehow also generated in the process. As an artist with a professional background in printmaking, Xu Hongxiang never abandoned his inquiries on material and technique. In his latest aluminum plate works, Xu Hongxiang utilizes this commonplace industrial material to visualize a kind of “arduous” physical existence. The aluminum sheets that are being violently cut, pierced, pulled, and reassembled into collage bear witness to the physical and mental labors the artist underwent. It also witnesses a kind of survival experience between industry and agriculture, city and country: harsh, rustic, bustling, bewildering, but also fueled with fierce passion.
As the theme of this exhibition, “An Exuberant View” first hints at Xu Hongxiang’s painting practice’s experience and visual style; and secondly, it is also an overarching description of his painting practice and motif—where one materializes and rectifies a gaze into an abundant, lush landscape. At last, “An Exuberant View” also implies the rhetoric of aesthetic value orientation. The “View” in the exhibition title represents the land and also the native soil, a source of vigorous, unrefined energy from the earth. When art descends into the dilemma of the lack of “knowledge production,” it is important and timely for us to return to the “field,” reverting from the excessive reference of “literature” to “naivete.”