Xiaoze Xie’s Artist Talk

Xiaoze Xie’s approach to historical art reflects his own personal history from his birth in China to his current life in the United States. He studied architecture in Beijing in 1988, witnessed the uprisings at Tiananmen Square, traveled to the mountains of China, and ended up an associate professor at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
His painting career began in libraries, with a fascination for the “rows of sleeping books”. They contained something abstract, something more than just a story for him. Painting the horizontal stacks of Chinese books was a way to paint a symbol of memories and history within the rigid structure of parallel lines—an aspect which appealed to the architect in him. He says he tends to work intensely on one theme, thoroughly exploring an idea. A systematic approach results in visual variety from his core inspiration. From Chinese books he moved on to other libraries, including the collection at MOMA, where he chose greenish tints to the largely black and white piece to reflect the different effect of the fluorescent lighting in the American library.
From these pieces which seemingly honor books in their native setting (“sleeping” in their libraries), he moved on to a more destructive topic: book burning. To tackle this part of history, he chose to integrate three dimensional components—railroad spikes—into the overall piece to emphasize the destruction and penetrative aspects of censorship. He depicted specific, labeled books flying through a bonfire, pages flapping like wings—a very different state from the unlabelled library series. Of course, the tension inherent in such an iconic act demands a different treatment of the elements of the scene, as Xiaoze Xie understood.
The study of books seemed to naturally lead to a study of newspapers, the reading material of daily life. In 1998, he began to paint stacks of newspapers, as they were stored in the library. Because the papers are folded, the newsprint along the edge appears as an abstraction, rendering it helpless in its mission to convey information. He progressed to editions of papers with color photos and thicker folds, giving more of a picture of what happened, but still a fragmented view of the original articles. If traditional history paintings are like reading a book on the war, Xiaoze Xie’s newspaper paintings deliver information about events like the evening news: a myriad of topics, and just the headlines. The painting creates a permanence of such a transient form of literature that seems somewhat undeserved, but nevertheless makes for an interesting discussion, especially in contrast to his earlier works about books on library shelves. This study in depiction of news became even more fascinating as he continued this series of American papers through the early 2000’s. The juxtaposition of a late 1990’s to a post-September 11 country emphasized the flashy nature of headlines warning about terror and international events.
Keeping with his thematic method, Xiaoze Xie moved on to explore politicians as a subject of drawings. Like the Spanish painter who dared to paint the king and queen as ugly as they were in real life, he depicted political figures in both the American and Chinese governments as realistically as possible. His newest work appears to be in this area, which needs to be developed further to generate the rich intellectual fodder that the “abstracted” newspaper series has produced.