Artist: Xie Yan
Curator: Cong Tao
Opening: 4:00 pm, 31st Dec., 2015
Exhibition Dates: 31st Dec.2015. – 2nd Mar.2016
Hive Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the opening of The Pivot -Between the Orient and Occident: Xie Yan Solo Exhibition on 31st Dec. The exhibition is curated by Cong Tao and will last until 2nd Mar.2016
Xie Yan has transcended the previous presentation of Chinese traditional landscapes in oil in his recent landscape creations, and been working on the materials, hence his integration of the two mediums, oil paint and ink, into a style mode with quite a flavor of the modern form, Xie was raised in a good environment of traditional Chinese painting, as his father and sister are noted artists respectively of figure painting and flower-and-bird painting. Soaked in such an environment day by day, he has found the undying pleasure of expressing his serenity and joy inside in the pure language of ink; in those landscape works with a flavor of the modern form, the quality of lines and the detailing of colors both show his mastery of the mediums of traditional Chinese painting.
With the practical experience of both traditional Chinese painting and oil painting, Xie Yan is often vividly regarded as “a walker of two legs” on the exploratory journey to the integration of materials. Nevertheless, the familiarization of materials is just the basis, Xie Yan’s ability of freely transforming and integrating the painting materials of China and the West, on the one hand, benefits from the incessant remedial learning of many artists since the 1980s, and, on the other, depends on his adoption of an open and tolerant attitude to absorbing from different art traditions the resources suitable for his artistic ideal naturally, instead of being obsessed with the serious responsibility for culture under the influence of some particular social and historical context. Such a contemporary attitude results from the gradual influence of informationization and commercial civilization in the twenty-first century; after the disenchantment and the enlightenment, contemporary people have a far greater ability to accept heterogeneous cultures and new things than before. In such an attitude, the barriers between the East and the West are of no significance, and what an artist would pay attention to is just how to find the effective approach to perfectly expressing his own living and aesthetic experience, so attention is rationally paid to the mediums or materials per se.
Back to Xie Yan’s recent landscape works out of the quest for the integration of Western oil paint and Chinese ink, it’s not necessary to bother whether they are Eastern or Western, traditional Chinese painting or oil painting; what they represent is just the contemporary attitude of the artist, a peaceful and open mind that leaps beyond the past barriers between Eastern and Western cultures, traditional and modern cultures, and focuses on the expression of personal aesthetic experience.
