“In the spring of 2019, the studio I had used for six years was about to be demolished. After it was emptied, I painted on the wall a wild black dog that often haunted the studio doors A few days later, the walls of the studio collapsed, taking the black dog with it.”

 

Xu Hongxiang’s account of the Big Wild Dog is preserved with its complete video record, awaiting the spring of 2023. This larger-than-life, wall-sized Big Wild Dog was reinscribed onto the old structure before it, and its memory was dislocated and dissolved. It was then preserved by the artist with the fragments of the wall and reconstructed and re-read in cyberspace. In these ways, it gets to be re-embodied after the passage of time and the ruptures of space, and the approach resembles Xu’s numerous works before and after this point: a certain reaction force that confronts possibilities of a dissolving individuality until its nature is restored, in a sensory, transitory and fragmentary postmodern society. These works, however, always serve to be a fleeting record of the transformation of things.

 

The montage of fluid images weaves in and out of various surfaces and across different media: oil, acrylic, aluminum, sketches, and videos. The dazzling moments that Xu Hongxiang captures are like a certain kind of self-talk to a handheld camera, which would turn in a split second from an Antonionian panorama of Chinese modernity to the radical advances of Werner Büttner. These panicked moments are often mistaken for “waste shots” of failed experiments, but in fact, they keep narrating—in an ever-proliferating manner—changes in the reaction forces.

 

As early as 2009 and 2010, Xu Hongxiang, a printmaking graduate, initiated the experimental concept of “image laundering,” whose logic runs completely counter to printmaking in that it completes an image by subtracting and dissolving rather than superimposing and nesting. Unlike the practice of using heavy paint to alter an image or to overlay, “image laundering” is more modern in that by using water currents that change in speed and volume, it erodes images printed on canvas so that these existing historical images, journalistic documents, and commercial images are totally transformed. His destruction of existing images and the obliteration of established traditions contain a certain Dada-like spirit. But when we look back at these works in 2022, which are innately “open to interpretation,” two other paths that were concealed at that time—in contrast to the more visible explorations of images and counter-images—emerge as the fountainhead of Xu’s later creations. One of them is the observation and interrogation of the “Cloakroom Community.” The other points to have—albeit ambiguously—a new understanding that the world is discrete and fluctuating. This phase of creation can be said to be dominated by intuition. 

 

Old constraints, represented by the art historical tradition and the teaching framework of art academies, are cut through with the hazy assault of strokes, yet the new order has not yet dawned. The world in the canvas takes on an unstable appearance, with unnamable forces slowly overflowing the boundaries of the frame. Individuals in these works are invariably inundated in the masses: in the Meat series where laundering precedes painting; in the Behind the Tree series where the human body and the landscape engulf each other; and in the Cross the River series where vague representations of groups of people are enacted, individuals are placed “as if in a stream where they can stay afloat without having to swim”ii. The blurry faces of individuals gather in these images and condense into a huge, amorphous landscape. Hence the hidden thread for later creations.

 

Flashes of forgotten fragments from those years can be frequently observed from series in the Displaced Images: the image transfer technique most adeptly used in the earlier series would now haunt the series, including Plants of the Gods, Diary of Xiang River, and Synthesis; works such as The Screen and The Nude Luminant hark back to the discussion on, and construction of body and landscape in the The Pink House (2013); the Synthesis series revisits the examination of the aluminum plate as a medium in A Single Life (2019-21). “A spiral of ascension,” Xu Hongxiang thus summarizes.

 

After “image laundering,” which centers on subtraction, the Displaced Images series seems to have returned to the original point of departure of the artist’s identity: as a printmaker. However, the new addition deviates from the initial awkwardness of the act of “washing away the original meaning after transferring the image”. On the one hand, the method of painting before printing, represented by Plants of the Gods, combines painting (the basis) and wood engraving (the emphasis). The engraved patterns that overlay the painting endow the work with a semiotic potency with the superimposition of various types of signifiers. This specific technique can be traced back to a collaboration between Xu and a friend in 2019: in the process of mutual “interferences” with each other’s images, the artist recalled the concept of “engraving,” created a “shark head” symbol on a KT board, and left “self-imprints” on his friend’s creation with stamps. Personal identity is thus expanded and emphasized in the two-fold technique of “painting” and “printing.” 

 

On the other hand, the simultaneous practice of painting and printing in Diary of Xiang River series is based on the ready-made historical images of the Xiangjiang River in Republican China. Paintings are improvised right when the historical photos are transferred onto canvas. This approach points to the intertextuality of different media and to the parallelism between reality and fiction.

 

However, the works after 2018 explicitly point to a more authentic and earnest subjective experience. Such an experience is variously presented through the disorderly diagrammatic errors or the deepening thematic explorations based on individuals, group portraits, and landscapes. The human faces in these complex forms of expression, though blurred, are instantly recognizable in terms of their connection with their creator. The artist gives more responses to the fluid world than the mere mutual dissolution of heterogeneous categories. The boundaries of images are now liquefied and bent, now cut off by hard edges and fissures. Despite the more complex changes that the things in the images would undergo, the painting space is more flattened than ever before as if to revoke the space’s own political rights, suggesting a world that no longer centers on production and does not exist to forge the mind and body of human beings. 

 

In addition, the fissures and distortions emphasized in the images point more poignantly to a shared postmodern state of being: as individuality is reinforced to an extreme and bridges between spaces keep growing in number, the physical and mental spaces of autonomous individuals in turn become doubly atomized and repeatedly ruptured, and would uselessly heap up under the pressure of different forces. 

 

However, in the seemingly chaotic confusion of things, Xu Hongxiang’s images do not cease to be meaningful. Rather, compared to the earlier ambiguity, they become clearer, more autonomous, and varied like self-relying slices of the “duration” (durée), showcasing an explicit construction and affirmation of one’s self-identity. All this can be attributed to the artist’s self-awareness of his internal power.

 

Xu Hongxiang refers to his “process of self-realization” from 2016 to 2017 as one of “more proactive choices,” which consists of three important creative nodes: Down to Earth, Li Qiang, and Mulian Villiage. This phase of self-realization, represented by Li Qiang, also prepares for the essential demarcation between his early creations (2009-2014) and his recent series (2018-2022). 

 

In 2016, Xu Hongxiang returned to Hunan from Beijing, the latter teeming with the specters of consumerism. After being pressured, assimilated, and alienated by external forces, the artist stood in Bauman’s nowhere ville—surrounded by abundant products or symbols but finding nowhere to go, hardly able to establish a deep connection with his surroundings. His loitering was interrupted by two young boys: Haohao and Jianjian, the artist’s nephews who share the same names with the works and who, despite being shown only in profile or with a back view, turned Xu’s gaze to a more concrete existence as well as to his inner world.

 

This aspect soon evolves into a series entitled Li Qiang. Li Qiang, a marginal figure who had existed outside either Xu’s circle of friends or the art world, who shared the memory of growing up with the artists, and who initially served only as a reference point of Xu’s creation, later so frequently entered Xu’s images that he ended up part of an intensive bout of mutual exchange: the artist painted Li Qiang’s portrait and gifted it to him, while his man-of-the-world friend reciprocated with his betel nut, the popular street food of the region. 

 

Perhaps, if we are to adopt Paul Atkinson’s terms, this is yet another version of the “interview society” that he conceptualized. However, it is precise because “viewing, hearing, or reading a confessional interview invites complicity with the penetration of the private self” that Xu had a chance to construct his self in his “interviews” with Li Qiang. 

 

Later, the artist further fertilized the project of Li Qiang with his experience in Down to Earth, namely, one that places personal memory and improvisation amidst the rural ruins: an enlarged picture (9×6m) of a man’s naked back finds itself, in a seated posture, amidst the woods and interpolating between the viewers and the tall buildings under construction. Li Qiang furthers the method and the theme of Down to Earth, and both works, in their exploration of the homeland, home inhabitants, ruins, and construction, give Xu Hongxiang the answer he has been trying to find—albeit through the use of his own instinct—for years: how to break the shackles of a search for community in a fluid and chaotic world, and to identify a true self in terms of artistic creation and social identity. 

 

By establishing an “other” and introducing concrete historical experiences, Xu Hongxiang can free himself from these doubts and gain the inner strength for his works to be carried upward in “a spiral of ascension.” Thus, the “I” and its view of the world no longer waver because of external forces, and the “authentic” keeps materializing in countless heterogeneous tracks.

 

Xu Hongxiang is aware that his “objection to the refined and the elitist things” drives his creation and serves as the fountainhead of the wild intransigence that informs his works, which finds concrete expressions in Down to Earth and Li Qiang. These two works reinforce the two paths mentioned above in his works from 2009-2010, and function as a steady powerhouse for his post-2018 creations. To start with, in these two works, the context in which human beings connect with nature and society gets to be clarified. 

 

Take Li Qiang: by throwing Li Qiang, a half-natural, half-alienated figure of industrial society, into the wild woods—which is equally the site of the village ruins—and making him gaze at the half-finished building as a symbol of power and commodity, man becomes a medium through which the natural meets the unnatural and all kinds of encounters become possible. In the face of the two giant “others,” Li Qiang, as the representative of both human creation and the human body, is neither engulfed nor excluded but becomes part of the equilibrium between past and future, between what is constant and what flows. In so doing, Xu’s “authenticity” also finds its place somewhere amidst the “fictional images” and “realistic scenes.” 

 

Unlike the hand coyly hiding in the forest and relentlessly gnawed by its surroundings in One Hand No.1 (2012), this philosophical portrait is informed by the confrontation between life and instruments, and the brief confrontation between the universe and civilization. The work is self-sufficient, and in the meantime, most fluently interacts with both nature and industrial society, with the body running freely into different landscapes. Such easeful freedom overflows some of his later series, including Viewing in 2018, Entanglement in 2019, and A Corner in 2020.

 

Secondly, the slogan of his objection to elitism sinks in, as the resistance to technology and image eventually points to more profound questions, namely, of the boundaries that keep shifting with power and desire, of the social identities that are forced to adhere or dissolve, and of the self that is compelled to split, dissipate, and melt away. Then, rural fields begin to parade across different series of his work as the antidote to turbulent cities, and in the very process, a more stable psychological space that is also of a higher dimension slowly takes shape, with traces of collages, prints, and splashes. Nevertheless, Xu does not celebrate the order and stability of the rural tradition. Rather, by relying on existences more abiding than technology and tools, he captures the internal force that has been annihilated in the consumerist spectacles. 

 

This also enabled his new attempt in 2017 to leave behind real characters and construct Mulianchong purely on the basis of his own imagination and memories. Unlike Down to Earth and Li Qiang, Mulianchong is not a documentary work but a series of ambiguous montages based on the pseudo-narrative of “me,” “my memories,” and “my kind.” The powerful interrogation and consolidation of the self in Down to Earth and Li Qiang makes this imaginary storyline valid. 

 

Therefore, however much the characters and stories in this work are fictional fragments, it reverberates with a rooted reality everywhere. This rooted quality is also observed in subsequent works such as Farmer, The Panorama View, and In the Landscape. The unnamed figures in these works keep confronting the landscapes in the memory, where Xu, their creator, is to be found everywhere across the canvas.

 

There have been profuse discussions about whether Xu’s paintings are properly and excellently composed or misplaced and disorderly images. Is Big Wild Dog a giant spray painting accomplished in the artist’s old studio, or is it a piece of wall skin retrieved after the structure collapsed, or even an image record retrieved from lost data? Do the “displaced images” refer to the raw material files set up on the desktop of Xu Hongxiang’s computer in 2021 or the magazine cuttings and image transfers he has been working on since 2008? Baudelaire once said that nearlyall our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility. In this sense, Xu Hongxiang’s images are merely transient petals that inadvertently drop as a response to such impressing forces while he is printing and transferring the flowing world.