Xie Nanxing 《Big Show - Xie Nanxing》
Wang Xingwei 《one-man show》

Exhibition at Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing
Opening: Saturday, 8 November 2008, 4 p.m. - 7 p.m.

Xie Nanxing 谢南星
Exhibition: 8 November, 2008 - 11st January, 2009

Wang Xingwei 王兴伟
Exhibition: 8 November, 2008 - 7th December, 2008
Gallery Open Time: Tuesday to Sunday 11 a.m. - 6.30 p.m.

For more information about the artists please click here:　
Big Show 
 
 

Xie Nanxing

"The First Round With a Whip No. 3" (also known as "The Wave No. 3") 2008

oil on canvas

219 x 384 cm

Robin Peckham

Xie Nanxing and Wang Xingwei at Urs Meile

(source: Robin Peckham, http://www.spursandfolds.com/)

To begin with, the Wang Xingwei canvases are absolutely horrid, some kind of bizarre attempt to confuse the East Asian superflat with the modes of high modernist geometry and poorly-executed Liu Xiaodong scenes gone surrealist.

The Xie Nanxing show, on the other hand, seems to have some body to it. Blurry images covered in waves such that the barely-representational scenes shared across three canvases almost disappear into dark, monochromatic, and textural pools of abstraction. Created via multiple layers of mediation involving television, photography, sketching, video, and paintings, these paintings seem to involve so many types of illusion that media critique seems to be the furthest thing from their phenomenologically-inspired readings of the body. The press release frames a reading of these works in terms of the unconscious, the illusion, the game, punishment, and education; acting as the static viewing object of these dynamic tactical machines, those art world figures playing pool outside the gallery and swinging from one painting to the next to the next and back again are anything but sober opponents.