Xiaoze Xie

In 1993, Xie began painting library books, intrigued by the architectural quality of rows and stacks and by their conceptual potential as material carriers of ideology, cultural memory and history.[31][32] He has explored this theme in many forms (decaying Chinese manuscripts, venerable reference books, crisp art archives, musical scores) found in libraries and museums from around the world.[31][20][26][8][33] The "Library" paintings take up concepts including order and control (through systems of classification), the potential for disorder, decay, and the vulnerability and fragmentary nature of historical memory; Xie has suggested that his horror at the historical destruction of books by China's Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, in part, played a role in his chosen themes.[20][21][33]

Xie's labor-intensive "Library" paintings[34] depict shelved books in large-scale close-up, revealing wear, human touch, and how objects are left.[31][26][20] He paints in what critics describe as a soft, brushy, almost impressionistic manner that captures the play of ethereal light, texture (crinkled parchment, frayed leather edges, pockmarks) and shadow;[26][4][35][36] his technique achieves precision but at times dissolves into near-abstraction or blurring that suggests a camera lens or the haze of memory.[37][21][35] Xie is sometimes linked to the realist and still-life traditions, but critics note several key differences: rather than stage tableaux, he photographs reference scenes as he finds them, composing in the viewfinder; he uses color subjectively, working in analytical near-black-and-white, warm red-brown-yellow, or almost-toxic greenish tones depending on his conceptual goals; he paints at a larger-than-life scale in which architectural presence de-familiarizes his subjects.[20][21][31][32] Kenneth Baker notes an interpretive openness in the work that can be read as elegiac, memorializing, cautionary, or critical, which is also foreign to traditional still life.[25][38]

In the late 1990s, Xie expanded his oeuvre, painting library stacks of consecutive, folded newspapers that critic Roberta Smith described as a "conceptually based way of measuring time and history."[30][31][6] In the aftermath of 9/11, the work took on greater urgency as Xie chose eventful periods—the U.S. during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, China during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the Beijing Olympics—to more sharply comment on world events.[39][1][3][4] Writers suggest that the "Newspaper" paintings capture the chaotic, fleeting nature of the periodical—the immediacy and urgency of events upon publication and their quiet aftermath as yesterday's news,[27] as well as their relentless (often numbing) accumulation of information in an age of media saturation.[1][3][38][18]

Xiaoze Xie, November 5, 2004. N.Y.T. (Bush Cabinet 2nd Term), oil on linen, 70" x 110.5", 2008.

Painted in the manner of the "Library" works, the "Newspaper" works range from monochromatic images of nearly-abstract horizontal patterning (e.g., "The Silent Flow of Daily Life" series)[40] to colorful, collage-like bands of images and text that collapse slivers of distinct events into surreal, ad hoc narratives about war, tragedy, power and national identity ("Fragmentary Views"[41] series).[1][3][23][42] The New York Times wrote of works such as March–April 2003, P.P-G. or March–April 2003, L.T.: "shards of war are laid on top of one another: guns, soldiers, a fireball and a plume of black smoke rolling over a row of palm trees. The staccato burst of images gives the painting a kind of jazzy rhythm."[1]

Xie has created several offshoots of the "Newspaper" works. His largely black-and-white "Theater of Power" (2006–8) series[43] draws on news photographs to depict Chinese leaders and moments during the Bush administration in brushy ink-on-rice-paper and oil works that reflect on causes and effects and the staging of news events (e.g., November 5, 2004. N.Y.T. (Bush Cabinet 2nd term)).[30][7] The "Both Sides Now" series (2007–15)[44] conveys the complexity and confusion of media overload through opened-up newspapers with overlapping, layered text and images that seem to have bled through from the back onto the front.[20][5][18] Xie's "Weibo" series (2013) extends his interest in ephemeral media with paintings of images downloaded from the popular Chinese social platform, many of them censored shortly after being posted.[5][32][45]

Xiaoze Xie, Objects of Evidence (Modern Books), acquired books, display vitrines, dimensions variable, Installation, Denver Museum of Art, 2017.

Xie's work in other media share the conceptual preoccupations of his paintings.[20][46] Several early installations (1994–9) addressed historical events involving censorship—the 20th-century student movements in China, the burning of books by the Nazis, the destruction of books by China's Red Guards.[20][47] He returned to that theme in the installation Rhythm of Time, Corridor of Memory (2010) and in the Denver Art Museum (DAM) and Asia Society shows, "Eyes On: Xiaoze Xie" (2017) and "Objects of Evidence" (2019).[11][48] The two shows investigated the history of book banning in China, revealing its ideological shifts by highlighting what different regimes made invisible.[36][48] They featured paintings, an installation of glass cases holding nearly three hundred banned books that Xie collected (Objects of Evidence, which compared first and second editions for censorship), life-size, mug-shot-like photographs of yellowing premodern books, and a documentary of Xie's research, Tracing Forbidden Memories.[36][11][10] Critic Barbara Pollack described the latter show's effect as "a mournful combination of awe and sadness."[48]

In several works, Xie used newspapers as a metaphor for temporality and the transitory nature of life, events and cultural memory. The video October–December 2001 (2002) shows a New York subway train of riders reading papers saturated with post-9/11 headlines (e.g., "Bloodbath," "Death Rattle"), set to a soundtrack of screeching trains and rapid-fire bongo music; it eventually empties leaving only the discarded dailies, in silence.[27][49] In the collaborative photographic/public intervention Last Days (2009, with Chen Zhong), he mounted newspaper on outside walls to create temporary monument/ruins throughout the Chinese city of Kaixian, which was razed, flooded and rebuilt on a different site as part of the Three Gorges Dam project.[20] Transience (2011) is a slow-motion color video showing ancient Chinese tomes and books by modernist thinkers in several languages floating against a depthless black ground as if tossed into the air; a warm glow from beneath suggests fire, the history of book burning, and the perishability of knowledge.[50][49]