 Imagination Becomes Reality Conclusion
Works in the Exhibition | Text
Xia Xiaowan: A Squatted Man, 2004
Photo: courtesy Goetz Collection
Works in the Exhibition
Descending Soul No. 2, 2006, painting on glass sheets, wooden base
A Squatted Man, 2004, painting on glass sheets, wooden base
Text
The two large 'picture sculptures' by Chinese artist Xia Xiaowan, Descending Soul No. 2, 2006, and A Squatted Man, 2004, each focus on a single motif. Xiaowan makes his works in an unusual way. He paints a series of realistic motifs on sheets of glass and then mounts the sheets behind one another on a frame on the floor, so that the overall image emerges from this arrangement. Rather like Damien Hirst's installations, Xiaowan’s images are indeterminate and disconcerting. Eschewing the single surface of conventional easel painting, the artist grants his works depth, space, and light without recourse to perspective. Like a traditional realistic painter, he sees his goal as the depiction of reality, an inherently difficult task on a two-dimensional surface.
Whereas Wall has found a method of using the strategies of painting to stage a segment of reality in photographic form, Xiaowan has discovered a new approach to depicting reality in painting. His 'picture sculptures', with their curiously timeless and alien aura, are fascinating, resembling fragmentary dream images. They constitute yet one more way in which contemporary artists have opened up fresh paths for painting and its strategies and continue to offer the viewer novel means of exploring reality and its representation.
Text excerpt »Images are generated by a gaze searching for new and personal insights.
They are images of those gazing at the world« (Author: Stephan Urbaschek), Exhibition Catalogue Imagination Becomes Reality Conclusion
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