| Xue Tao, a talented and exciting young artist who was born in Yunnan in 1975 and graduated from the art department of the University of Suzhou in 1998, is just a little over 30 years old. He is part of a generation of artists that shows internationally and that creates the art it wants without feeling the need to conform to the dictates of categories. Nor does this generation need to choose between art and design, sculpture and furnishing, high and low, fine art and craft. For these artists, such distinctions are no longer necessary, as the interdisciplinary increasingly becomes the norm. |  |
Form ≠ Function – Lilly Wei
Xue Tao, a talented and exciting young artist who was born in Yunnan in 1975 and graduated from the art department of the University of Suzhou in 1998, is just a little over 30 years old. He is part of a generation of artists that shows internationally and that creates the art it wants without feeling the need to conform to the dictates of categories. Nor does this generation need to choose between art and design, sculpture and furnishing, high and low, fine art and craft. For these artists, such distinctions are no longer necessary, as the interdisciplinary increasingly becomes the norm. Expert in several practices, some are technocrats enamored of new media, while others prefer the low-tech and the hand-made. Others still, fabricate multi-media hybrids of all kinds. Xue Tao favors the low-tech and the hand-made, deftly combining a number of strategies and attitudes to create his striking, subtly idiosyncratic sculptures and/or furnishings. He thinks of them as both art and design and invites his viewers to share his refusal to pin down objects that do not need to be formally identified. He aspires to perceptual flexibility and ambiguity, to dual or multiple characterizations. Some have linked his works to Arte Povera and certain other paradigm-shifting movements of the 60s and 70s in Europe and the United States. He shares with these once radical groups a deep interest in materials, in found objects and in disposable, non-art substances—the detritus and discards of our industrialized life. Yet, Xue Tao interjects a more contemporary edge to his production through dialectic between the practical and the purely aesthetic as he embraces art, design and function without self-consciousness, without resistance. He develops concepts that artists such as the Americans, like Scott Burton (known for elegant, minimalist interpretations of art and design) and Richard Artschwager (known for witty, deadpan transformations of commonplace objects into art), introduced into the discourse in the 80s, although Xue Tao was unaware of their work.
Xue Tao’s recent projects include chairs, rugs, tables, columns and furnishings—some quite abstract and not easily defined—that deliberately suggest a range of modernist and postmodernist styles. They also vary in scale, from one that approximates the architectural, to another that is equivalent, to real chairs or tables, to one that is much smaller. His signature materials are metal wire, aluminum, fiberglass, rubber and, in particular, newspaper—stacks and stacks of it. When asked, the artist calculated that he used well over a ton of it last year. Making a support system out of wire mesh and other materials, Xue Tao crumbles newspaper and twists it tightly, weaving it into the armature that he finally sprays with a coating of wax as a sealant. The newspaper serves as the stuffing for his precise, tightly fabricated, marvelously obsessive constructions and his finished pieces have a nubby, tufted surface, the result of the wadded paper protruding from its grid wire matrix. The effect is a kind of modulated pointillism or pixelation in an essentially monochromatic field with a glimpse of color now and then. Xue Tao has been experimenting with newspaper since 2000 and thinks of his work as time capsules of sorts. If desired later, he muses that his work could be dismantled, deconstructed, the papers smoothed out and read to see what was occurring at the time the piece was made. He is pleased that his work carries within itself a context—the current events that describe the time of its creation. It is a somewhat paradoxical approach since he wants his work to endure while also being treated as a throwaway, to be insouciantly taken apart. A commentary, perhaps, on the iconic chairs designed by architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and Frank Gehry, Xue Tao positions his objects as both permanent and impermanent, like a Platonic version of a (modern) chair made out of the ultimate disposable material, newspaper. Xue Tao subverts the sleekness and exclusivity of his precursors while also referring to the many copies—some licensed but many more not—that they have inspired. Newspaper is also readily available, egalitarian, metaphorically charged, with a long history of usefulness for those without abundant resources, adapted as construction material and insulation, stuffed into cracks in walls and windows, layered into jackets or crammed into shoes for warmth and additional protection from the elements.
Some of Xue Tao’s pieces are considerably less functional in appearance or their original function is twisted, reconsidered, such as Dragon 1, a schematic outline that suggests the contortions of that lithe and legendary creature or Cocoon, a gracefully suspended ovoid form that resembles an enormous silkworm’s cocoon—another version of home, perhaps. Some are humorous, like his collapsed, collapsing tent which seems to be hiding a body beneath it or his interpretation of a flying carpet that seems incapable of flight. His Circular Hole, might be seen as a misplaced golf hole or a curious but nonetheless attractive ash tray or some other useful receptacle and his tangled Rope Coil presents one material masquerading as another, its purpose undermined. Xue Tao, and artists and designers like him, have bypassed one of the standard maxims of 20th century architecture and design, the rule that form follows function, and in doing so, presses for more open-ended, irreverent models and less canonical resolutions.
Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic who writes regularly for Art in America and is a contributing editor at ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific.
