In Xiaoze Xie’s large-scale oil paintings, future history is spied through stacks of folded newspapers, their headlines and front-page photos only partially visible to our eyes. Xie’s work is alternatingly soothing—thanks to the artist’s color choices and flattened gesture—and confrontational. Our response, to be lulled as well as shocked, mirrors world events as well as the emotional interior of global citizens of crumbling political infrastructures. Just as the artist intended.
Xie, who currently holds an endowed chair at Stanford University, was born in China at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution but has lived, attended university and taught in the United States for the past 20 years. His transnational vantage point inflects this neatly mounted show at the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, running through Nov. 23. Jointly curated by Sesnon Gallery Director Shelby Graham with professor emerita Joyce Brodsky, the exhibition moves beyond postmodern photorealism in offering a non-ironic statement of the eerie, mediated visual culture hustled through print media. These journalistic inventories of catastrophes morphed into temporary, sudden and, most importantly, partial views form the vehicle for Xie’s soft-focus ethical arguments.
The Sesnon Gallery’s two chambers create a tone of intimacy that adds tension to the large-scale implications of Xie’s work. In the smaller of the rooms, realist paintings of books seemingly discarded in mid-air, flung and blurred a la Gerhard Richter, pack a quiet but powerful punch. At the far end rises an installation called Chinese Library No. 1, created entirely of books foraged from rummage sale tables and stacked up to the ceiling, upon which is projected a video showing book after book tossed and whirling through space. Marx, Sartre, Freud—all are tossed into oblivion. The point, while not new, is made anew, and still offers plenty of existential chill to go around.
The main room holds large-scale paintings, each of which suggests a shrine, calling us to stop and meditate on a future about to implode. In these, stacks of newspapers are piled up randomly. We see only the folded edge, tiny “moments” of what has happened; the contents remain hidden within. We never quite know if our interpretation is correct, or if any interpretation is. The largest work, painted in shades of blue, shows us machines, devices and vehicles of war. In others, apocalyptic images tease us with what might, or might not, be going on in the multi-national everywhere that trashes our collective serenity. Folded tabloids focus on the Middle East in bright red paint. Faces, some in chador, peek out at us, questioning, confronting, killing.
Media saturation and our willingness to read, only partially, between the headlines, is Xiaoze Xie’s thought for the global day. It is one that many try to avoid—a bracing dose of how events might, or might not, really be unfolding in an East/West that is morphing into uneasy unison.
Xiaoze Xie: Resistant Archeology
Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, UCSC
Through Nov. 23
