Latin American Art In a Global Context:
Report on Sin Tìtulo, 2006

Moths to the Flame:
Radiance and Rupture in the Work of Xie Nanxing

Text / David Spalding

Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.
÷Franz Kafka

Untitled (Picture of Voice I), 2001, oil on canvas, triptych: 220 x 380 cm (each) (courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne and Beijing)

Back in March, artist Xie Nanxing invited me to his Beijing studio to see a painting he had recently completed. While I had visited his studio before, and was aware that he was experimenting with new ways of working, his call caught me by surprise. Knowing that the painting would probably not stay in China for long÷it had already been sold to a leading European collection whose name was near the top of a long waiting list÷I rushed to hail a taxi.

For Xie, the creation of each new body of work is prefaced by a period of intense reflection and inner turmoil÷about the history and limitations of painting, the desired psychological impact of a new series, and the knowledge gained by making his previous works. After settling on his chosen subject, the artist begins assembling his preparatory materials. In addition to making sketches and studies, his process has included video since 2001. Xie plays his video footage on a monitor, and photographs the playback directly from the monitorâs screen. Infused with a violent luminosity, these photographs are then transformed into exacting, enormous paintings through Xieâs carefully controlled application of four thin layers of oil paint÷without the aid of projecting the image onto the canvas. He often produces triptychs, one of which can take up to a year to finish. He had completed this new painting in just six weeks.

I met Xie at the modest apartment complex where he has worked for the last six years. His studio space is a nearly empty room with a concrete floor, a single window, and fluorescent lights overhead÷the living room of what was intended to be a two-bedroom flat. While many of his contemporaries have spacious studios teaming with assistants, Xie prefers this nearly monastic simplicity. He made me coffee and we sat on small stools facing his latest creation.

Like Xieâs other recent paintings, the new work, Untitled, 2006,1 revealed itself slowly. This one was unlike any I had seen before, however, and I was, for a time, speechless. Leaning there against the wall, it initially seemed nearly monochromatic, a field of carmine, like lithium held over the flame of a Bunsen burner. Then, as I studied its surface more closely, dark patches began to appear, amorphous clouds on a distant horizon. Except that there was no horizon, and the smudges were refusing to assume fixed forms, generating a strange sensation of depth as they slowly receded or leapt forward. Xie finally broke our silence: ãKeep looking,ä he said encouragingly, ãand tell me what you see.ä His right leg was bouncing nervously up and down.  Then they began to take shape: the large, shadow-like bodies of two moths, seen from above, as if through an electrified red haze. They appeared to have collided head-on; oneâs antennae had been cleaved off in the scuffle.

Xie pointed to a blurred word in one of the paintingâs corners, written in a slanting, cursive script. It had begun as Kodakâs ãRoyalä logo, but was now obscured by additional layers of paint. The source of the brilliant red color, he explained, was the leader on a roll of photofinishing paper, found on the floor of a film processing lab. The moths had been drawn to the same light, and crashed into each other while urgently seeking its source. Xie himself was unsettled by the painting, by what seemed to him like a complete break from his usual way of working. While excited by the prospect of painting more spontaneously, this newfound freedom was also daunting. ãI feel like a kite,ä he told me, ãwhose string has been cut.ä

To me, the painting did not seem such a radical departure from Xieâs previous works. Rather, it allegorizes a central aspect of the artistâs practice: Xie enlists the videographic and photographic mediation of his subjects and the traffic between imaging technologies and painting÷made tangible here by the use of photofinishing paper as the paintingâs backdrop÷to infuse his paintings with a strange radiance, a disorienting light that draws viewers, like moths to a flame, toward a dangerous encounter with what Lacan called ãthe gaze,ä and ãthe real.ä

To understand this formulation, we must review these Lacanian concepts in relation to visual arts, a process that can be expedited by considering Hal Fosterâs essay, ãThe Return of the Real.ä2 Citing two seminars that appear in Lacanâs The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,3 ãThe Unconscious and Repetition,ä and ãOf the Gaze as Objet Petit a,ä Foster reminds us that the real÷a traumatic real÷is something that defies symbolic representation. It cannot be perceived directly, but might be characterized as the ãecstasy of desire shot through with death.ä4 Since the real threatens to overwhelm the subject, it must be mediated by the ãimage-screenä of visuality, the cultural encoding of vision that acts as a shield between the subject and the real. However, the real still lurks beneath our representations, which it occasionally ruptures. ãIt is a rupture less in the world,ä Foster explains, ãthan in the subject÷between the perception and consciousness of a subject touched by an image.ä5

In this equation, the gaze threatens to rupture the image-screen and expose the subject to the real..67 Yet, surveying contemporary art circa 1996, Foster identifies certain practices÷Cindy Shermanâs abject photographs of the early 1990s, for example÷that seem to court the real, to rend the image-screen, to allow us, if only for an instant, to stare directly into that obliterating gaze. ãIt is as if this art wanted the gaze to shine,ä Foster writes, ãthe object to stand, the real to exist, in all the glory (or the horror) of its pulsatile desire, or at least to evoke this sublime condition.ä

With his astonishing technical skill and conceptual rigor, Xie Nanxing creates paintings that stage profound confrontations between the viewer and the dazzling, vertiginous real. Taking his subjects through a complex cycle of technical mediations that abrades the surface of the image-screen, he draws out a magnetic, devouring light that seems to pulse across the surfaces of his canvases. By rendering disfigured scenes in his super-realistic style, he reveals an anxiety to seal off the real, but deliberately leaves the project incomplete, so that this anxiety becomes a contagion, infecting viewers. To stand in front of one of Xieâs paintings for any length of time takes a certain amount of courage.

As the artist explained to me,

Since the beginning of civilization, people have seen reality through the glasses of culture. Over time, the lenses in these glasses have grown thicker and thicker. Today they are as thick as long telescopes! Using video and photography in my painting, I try to make people aware of these glasses. As an artist, I cannot stand alone. I need a cane, and this cane is the light you see in my paintings. People cannot live without their glasses, but I do try to smash them with this cane!ä8

Untitled (No. 5), 1998, oil on canvas, 190 x 150 cm (private collection)

Untitled (No. 9), 1999, oil on canvas, 190 x 150 cm (private collection)

Untitled (Liquid), 2000, oil on canvas, 220 x 380 cm (courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne and Beijing)

Untitled (Flame), 2000, oil on canvas, 220 x 380 cm (courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne and Beijing)

It would seem that the lesson the artist extracted from the 1998-1999 series was that the mediated image strikes closer to the essence of the subject. Thus with the following series of 1999-2000, Xie inverts his previous method, making photographs in and around his studio the basis for five remarkable paintings that imbue their banal subjects with an uncanny, predatory realism. With its slightly skewed angle and eerie lighting, Untitled (Corridor), 1999, suggests an institutional hallway, seen through the eyes of a drugged patient who is attempting an escape. Untitled (Liquid), 2000, is a pool of black fluid that appears tumescent, seductive, and toxic, moving as if by its own volition toward a flash of light reflected on the floor.  Untitled (Flame), 2000, invites viewers to stare directly into the lit burner of a gas stove, where flickers of blue, red, and white-hot fire overtake the canvas. All of the paintings from 1999-2000 reveal that our mundane surroundings mask something at once sinister and alluring: the real. Indeed, Lacan calls the screen of representation a mask, which Xie pulls at relentlessly. Were we to fall into that shimmering, oily darkness, or abandon ourselves to the heart of the flames, we might catch a glimpse of what lies beyond their perfectly painted surfaces.

Xieâs subsequent works are marked by the introduction of the video camera as the generator of images from which his paintings gradually emerge. Photographing the video images as they appear on a monitor, Xie captures a disorienting light that he translates, as if by some dark art, into his works. In the triptych Untitled (Picture of Voice 1), 2001, which depicts a highway seen at night through the windshield of a moving car, the use of video breaks the picture into a series of minute, horizontal bands, making the image-screen of representation seem all the more fragile. In the central painting, an oncoming car rushes toward the viewer, one of its headlights transformed into the blinding flash of a solar eclipse. Assaulting viewers with this light, the painting attempts the impossible task of rendering the real symbolically, but the light is also an hypnotic abstraction, reaching out through the artificial surface of the painted video to lock the viewer in its intractable gaze.

The power of the gaze to eviscerate the subject is further explored in Xieâs 2002-2003 series of six paintings.

Untitled (No. 4), 2003, oil on canvas, 150 x 360 cm (courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne and Beijing)

Untitled (No. 5), 2003, oil on canvas, 150 x 360 cm (courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne and Beijing)

Rendered in the hazy, muted hues of a weak-signaled television broadcast, these long, horizontal canvases show solitary, male and female figures lying naked on the floor of a nearly empty room. In this melancholic space, time seems to stretch on infinitely. Itâs as if these figures had always been here. Are they even alive? A small window in the background surges with a frightening light that seems to rupture them into oblivion. The seriesâ later paintings show the room devoid of life, as if these figures, vulnerable and exposed, had vaporized upon contact with the real. In the final painting, even the roomâs furniture is gone, the starkness making it seem as though the previously witnessed scenes took place long ago.

Discussing his production process for this series with critic and curator Nataline Colonnello÷an authority on Xieâs work÷the artist spoke of the incredible psychological challenges he faced, as he fell under the gaze that he conjured:

Although in my works there is light, well, that light is really driving me to death. Help! It seems as if I was forced to have this very long dream·at the beginning I wanted to control my creations but during the pictorial process I found myself gradually dominated by them; finally, the one who was held hostage was me!!10

 

 

Untitled (No. 2), 2004, oil on canvas, 218 x 323 cm (courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne and Beijing)

Untitled (No. 3), 2004, oil on canvas, 220 x 385 (courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne and Beijing)

Yet Xie continues to reach toward the dazzling light that emanates from behind the screen of representation. He has recently developed a new technique to create his Untitled, 2005 triptych, which is loosely based on Van Goghâs depiction of a billiard hall in his famous Night Café in the Place Lamartine of 1888. Billiards is one of Xieâs favorite hobbies. For Van Gogh, the pool hall represented a place whose pleasant exterior trappings concealed something sinister. In a letter written shortly after the painting was completed, Van Gogh explains:

I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin one's self, run mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express as it were the powers of darkness in a low drink shop...and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace, of pale sulfur, all under an appearance of Japanese gaiety and the good nature of Tartarin..

 

Untitled (No.2), 2005, oil on canvas, 220 x 385 cm (courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne and Beijing)