MOCA@Loewen is proud to present Transmutations Across The Space, an exhibition by world-renowned Chinese contemporary artist Xia Xiaowan. This is Xia’s first solo Singapore exhibition, as well as his first with MOCA@Loewen. Unlike any other two dimensional painting, Xia Xiaowan surpasses the boundaries of painting motion fluidity and structural form. He establishes a new way of "looking" at paintings. Using his famed painting technique of Spatial Painting and the strong influences of Baroque, Xia’s works are what one would say to be sheer imaginative innovation and experimentation.
The works of Spatial Painting are defined by the space composed of many two-dimensional units of work. It specifies the action and result of paintings within space, not singular paintings of individual surfaces. In simple terms, Xia’s three-dimensional artworks are composed of multilayered tiers of glass of two-dimensional illustrations.
In Transmutations Across The Space, the series divulges on the concept of "corporality", questioning the viewers' perception. Paintings are in two dimensions. The Western method of setting up a perspective using one focal point is a pure illusion. Upon handling with two-dimensional space there are two methods; one is the basic three-dimensional feeling of bulk, the standard regard of technical depictions of colour gradient and shading technique. The other method, Xia’s preferred method, is the understanding of the viewing process, using the perspective of space, the principals of light, anatomical principals and recording the process of viewing. It is not viewing of one moment but the pictorial space, illusionary, point-perspective, the visual graphics of that one projected significant moment. Time seems to stop in Xia’s works yet the depictions capture the moment in motion, as if it would appear that the subject is in a time loop.
Transmutations Across The Space will also feature the life-sized Sketch Portrait No. 3 of twenty-two sheets of glass that depicts an intensely, breathtaking warped form of a head. It is through such perplexed expressing of form and shape that we understand that human vision is the result of overlapping two optical views. So our understanding of the techniques used in a flat projected image as to being unrelated to our own visual experience is mistaken. It is the result of scientific technique, but not human observation, at the most it is the observation of a single eye, recording the process of time.
Transmutations Across The Space will feature the haunting and perplexing three-dimensional installation of Combining, a 14 tier glass spatial painting of two bodies colliding into one. To capture the constant motion of bodily form, Xia inculcates Baroque’s style of line repetition. Doing so, Xia’s aliens or ghouls or in other words, ethereal subjects revolve around the dynamically elaborate and intensely dramatic movements that capture the chilling yet overwhelmingly bewildering essence of pure form. Xia’s works rotate around experiencing the significance of motion and embracing the consciousness of form and structure on a whole other level. Xia’s techniques rebel against, instead of conforming to the conditions of objectivity; adding elements of installation and sculptural art whilst displaying the cold, absurd and strange qualities of realism.
It is not a line that is appearing surrounding the shape, but a shifting terminus, one that we can see. In actuality behind it the form is forever progressing, therefore this conclusion will transform. While it is transforming we decide at which point it is a comprehensible awareness. It shouldn’t be viewed passively. Xia renders is not the static object but the pulses of both him and the object, in this relationship he searches the thing he paints. Common visual experiences are transformed upon viewing Xia’s ghouls. Upon viewing that forms one might feel nervous or even excited; the elements of danger, the unknown and the peculiarity of Xia’s experimentally imaginative force invoke intimidation.
With such dynamic imagination, Xia creates and paints men whilst he experiments such forms with as much eccentricity as possible; forms and shapes that defy, yet exhibit human traits. Xia divides his content into two major categories: one is entirely subjective, what he aims to express, what he wants to say, or create, what kind of information do he yearns to transmit, what kind of form that is created, the utilizing of light and shadow. The other kind being more conceptual, it is completed with help from the basis of this medium where it is purely digression, and not an accumulation upon a source. With techniques constantly being perfected, every slice has its own imprint.
