Xie Qi: The Unbearable Weight of Things

Pékin Fine Arts is pleased to host our 2^nd solo exhibit of artist Xie Qi, and her first in Hong Kong. Xie Qi’s work was most recently exhibited at Pékin Fine Arts in Beijing in the “Summer Group Exhibition” (Jun 13 – Aug 30, 2015). Her work is also featured in the just-published book, Half The Sky: Conversations With Women Artists in China (Piper Press 2016. ISBN 9780980834741),  by Luis Guest, Director of Education and Research at White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney.  Xie Qi graduated from Beijing’s Central Academy of Art and Design. She is a full time artist, living and working in Beijing. Her works are in the M+ Museum Collection in Hong Kong and the Sigg Collection in Switzerland. An exhibition catalogue will be published to accompany the Hong Kong exhibition.

In her latest series of paintings the artist continues her fascination with the intimacy of material life and the objects we choose to live with, questioning whether these “Things” provide comfort or paradoxically end up tyrannizing our lives. In the anthropomorphic art of Xie Qi, “Things” are imbued with living breathing spirits. And these “Things” force us to accommodate their presence in our lives.

The artist relies on multi-colored, richly layered brushwork, to endow each painting- subject (whether still life, landscape or portrait) with the power to seduce. The artist wryly observes the painting-subject, as well as the painting itself, as she transforms it into a new “Art Object” for acquisition, a new “Thing” of the artist’s creation.  In an Artist’s Statement, Xie Qi tenderly watches over her painterly offspring, having produced yet another “Thing” for which she alone is responsible, not unlike a mother witnessing the growth of her children, “…As our things accumulate, we begin to hear the incessant clamour of our things, in our most intimate spaces…. One-by-one, the personalities of our things emerge, to the point that soon they too will have souls. The desire a person imposes on things is reflected back onto him or herself.”