Xiaoze Xie

Xiaoze Xie originally studied architecture in Southern China, where he was born, but after his studies, he wanted to “break out from straight lines” and pursue a career in fine art. In his earlier work, he painted stacks of books in libraries. In this series, he was interested in capturing these “sleeping” books, sitting unread in libraries. He sees books as containers of the abstract, artifacts of loss, memory: they pursue permanence. They are not simply about knowledge. He paints the books as if they are portraits, honoring the valuable work they have done for the world. In a later series of books from MOMA, he chooses modernist compositions to echo the modernist subject matter. whereas his first series was not at all interested in the content of the books.

In his next series, “The Silent Flow of Daily Life,” he began painting newspaper piles, showing fragments of headlines of old, archived papers. By this time in his career, he has come to the realization that he is a still-life painter, but his subjects aren’t necessarily still. Rather, the news, the content of the publications are alive, actively working to preserve the memory of the events it speaks of. He argues that the way we interact with papers is what is still. All these awful things happen around the world (most of his paintings focus on papers with headlines chronicling wars, political uprisings, etc.) but we receive these events as still images, as stagnant text. They come to us, and within a day, become just one in a pile of other old, now useless papers. But somehow they create a beautiful order. Their contents are chaos, but their archiving calms the chaos. Xie related this idea to Communism and Mao’s “Little Red Book,” inspiring Xie to use his paintings as parts of installations, this time focusing on how books are not just the record keepers, but can be the reason for uprisings, book burnings, etc.

In a video project, he follows the lifespan of a newspaper in the New York City subway system. The camera follows a newspaper being read, accentuating the aesthetic qualities of the paper, how it can be folded/manipulated, then zooming in on the images from the paper, focusing on the miserable occurrences that happen daily in our world, and once the emotion peaks, the paper is seen abandoned on the ground, forming a simple geometric line on the pavement. While this video was by no means his strongest work, it did seem to encapsulate his feelings about newspapers, while chronicling his own art-history with the subject.

He spoke at the end of his talk as to the importance of following your artistic impulse – to find what interests you and explore it, catalogue it, deconstruct it, and put it back together. And, indeed, Xiaoze Xie’s work is evidence of this, his work serving as an all-encompassing survey of the subject of archived texts.