Xiaoze Xie, 4/23/09

Xiaoze Xie, currently a professor at Bucknell Univeristy, first began his studies in a background of architecture and then moved into the fine arts. Upon graduation, he traveled a lot and sketched within the mountainous regions of China. This structural, sparse, and mathematical quality of work is reflected within his earlier series, entitled “The Libraries” (1993), “Digging into old papers” (1994-1999), “The Silent Flow of Daily Life” (1998-), and “Fragmentary Views” (2001).

Within “The Libraries” series, Xiaoze Xie captures rows of “sleeping” books that appeared to form walls around him as he visited these various libraries. The paintings realistic qualities lend themselves to his method: he painted from black and white photographs that he took for this series, and would continue to paint from photographs in his future works. Xie explained that in this series, he was more interested in the history of the book itself rather than the information that it was meant to convey; books as symbols of time, memory, and loss as opposed to methods of reference.

He then moves into more of a political realm with his series “Digging into Old Papers.” Through the use of acrylic underneath the oil image, Xie portrays the vulnerability of the young Chinese students protesting that he portrays. Xie discussed that he was “questioning the idea of revolution always as a form of progress.”

Xie continued to shape his political works within the series “Fragmentary Views,” in which bits and pieces of paper combine to make a “micro-history” as well as a commentary on media, mass consumption, availability of information, and the distribution of information to the masses. At this point in his life, he was able to combine his interest in books, the act of organizing information, politics, and history collectively into one series, which he entitled “The Theatre of Power” (2005-). In this, he expresses his interest in what he calls the “theatre of politics,” in which politicians always wear a mask and play specific characters within specific settings. He moves away from the realism of photography that he relied on so much before in his earlier works, and instead focuses on the texture of the paint and the tactile elements of the brushstrokes.

He also talked about his interest in the depiction of crowds, and how “history only records the great deeds of a few people.” This is reflected in his latest work, “October-December 2001,” and his current focus on a post-9/11 world. In his video piece, he records various headless and nameless figures riding the subway amidst the almost violent ambient noise and headlines announcing the violent acts of various dates.

While in answering his questions from faculty he didn’t seem to be 100% positive on why he made some of the choices that he did within his work (such as his use of large scale and how that relates to the viewers physical engagement with the piece), however his overall drive in a specific field of thought has taken his work in a specific and effective direction.