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Ulrike Münter on Xia Xing
In 2004, Chinese artist Xia Xing (born in 1974 in Shihezi, Xinjiang |
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Ulrike Münter on Xia Xing
Beginning your day by looking at the papers implies leaving the cozy retreat of private life. Every day brings new papers, new news. Like some tidal phenomenon, the deluge of texts and images floods readers.
In 2004, Chinese artist Xia Xing (born in 1974 in Shihezi, Xinjiang province, now living in Beijing) started a picture chronicle, wherein he paints from front-page photographs from issues of Xin Jingbao (New Beijing News, published since November 2003). These photographs, reporting about remarkable events—more or less faithfully to details—are reiterated in oil and often with broad brushstrokes, on canvasses of identical size: 70 cm in height and 100 cm in width. If the original photograph is vertical, this self-imposed size restriction forces Xing to intervene. Each annual sequence is composed of around 60 pictures, each titled with the publication date of the newspaper.
How does the image memory of newspaper readers work? To what extent do press photos still convey information when you take away their caption text? And is there such a thing as a global image memory? Standing before Xia Xing’s paintings, one realizes the potential as well as the limits of the medium at first hand. Chinese viewers will no doubt be familiar with much more of the subject matter than those from outside China, in particular since in several cases the scenes contain hanzi characters on banners or billboards: in the works 05.05.21 and 05.10.17, the script is actually at the center of the painting. While the kneeling, staring man with the sign around his neck immediately makes one think of some form of public humiliation, viewers learn from the inscription that this is in fact a missing persons report—and what’s more, the writer who deplores the loss of his wife is threatening retribution in the same breath, for the text says “I am looking for my wife, Ma Yanchun. If she does not return within the next three days, I will kill somebody.”
With increasing temporal distance from the event to which paintings refer, even the most informed person loses touch with the image’s content. Xia Xing’s “pictures based on pictures” set off a mental search program in the viewer, an exploration of the scope of one’s own knowledge, a virtual walk through the individual image and the individual’s information archive. One becomes aware how quickly even incidents that were emotionally charged at the time of their occurrence can no longer be remembered.
Xia Xing’s works create an imaginary reversal of time—they turn the standard dogmas of press photographs into their opposite. For the principle of a news photograph is to reach the reader with the most possible up-to-dateness, i.e. with little or no temporal distance from the events shown in the photos. Xia Xing, however, makes us realize the transitory nature of emotions such as curiosity, outrage, or dismay.
Comparing the photographic source material with Xia Xing’s paintings, we notice—despite an obvious preference for the image content, as opposed to an ambition for pictorial originality—certain variations in the technique. While the artist displays scenes of political power with strikingly flat and almost monochrome application, he composes all faces—but often also the backdrops of scenes portraying human distress or even happiness—with a well-managed, flickering illumination. In 05.01.06 it is the front-page headline and public praise of the newly-born 1.3 billionth Chinese; in 05.01.19 it is the abduction of Chinese migrant workers in Iraq. Whether it is a baby with a rosy complexion surrounded by surgery nurses and clean white sheets or the victims of Iraqi despotism in unwelcoming gray, blue, and dusty beige tonalities, it is the almost violently expressive brushwork and the intense coloring of the paintings that reflect a state of agitation. The worm’s, or bird’s, eye view of many of the paintings adds an additional element of disconcertment.
Every history of art, whether Western or Eastern, is characterized by periodic redefinitions of the artist’s function and position within society. The art scene of China, which had been thriving and alive with international exchange in the early 20th century, was brought to a grinding halt by the early People’s Republic and even more so by the Cultural Revolution. Suddenly cut off from the rest of the world, the independent development of Chinese modern art was stalled for quite some time. Under Mao, art was nothing but an extension of the party line. All imagery was reduced to that of Socialist realism. After the opening of the country at the end of the 70s, Chinese artists searched, in the most diverse genres, for new forms of expression that reflected their own temperaments and intentions. Aside from a revival of landscape painting and calligraphy, the garish Mao pop art and the provocative attitude of Cynical Realism, there was the group of artists that Xia Xing can be associated with. Creating work to them is a state of mind, it serves to define their point of reference in the rapidly changing reality of life. What really counts is not the limelight of the art industry, the vain dramatization of one’s own originality. The framework of everyday life becomes the very subject of one’s work.
So there is a profound logic in Xia Xing’s decision, as an artist living in Beijing, to focus on a daily newspaper that—with more than 450,000 copies sold every day—has no little influence on the capital’s public opinion but actually represents that opinion. In particular since this very newspaper, although administratively under the control of the Communist party, has the self-proclaimed aim to become more of a mouthpiece for the newly forming middle class. Next to semi-official articles on politics and the economy, one may read about the questionable handling of SARS patients or a bad storm disaster that the authorities didn’t bother to warn the population about. An editorial note says, “We accept all responsibility for the news we print. There are some things we will not be able to report on. But we will not write any news that is false.” Even though there can be no question of freedom of the press in the Western sense, Xin Jingbao marks a real upheaval in the media landscape, reflecting at the same time the changing daily realities that the inhabitants of China’s metropolises are living with. Xia Xing’s picture chronicle documents these developments.
