Chinese artist Xie Xiaoze has had a lifelong passion for books. In his worldview, books are conveyors of prestige and signifiers of collective cultural knowledge - repositories of historical meaning, cultural conflict, and political strife. Undertaking a massive study of banned books and forbidden knowledge in China, the artist has amassed a large personal library of titles that have been restricted by various regimes since the early twentieth century.
As a realist painter by vocation, early in his career Xie found a way to incorporate his interest in Chinese history and books by focusing his paintings on the materials stored in archives and library stacks. Xie’s paintings are somehow able to elevate and romanticize the books he portrays, yet without over-exaggeration or ‘over-painting’ his subjects. With the scale that he works in, the books appear more realistic and ‘focused’ as one moves further away, and more painterly and expressive as you get closer to the painting.
This painting is a study for the works titled “Through Fire (Books that Survived the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance at Tsinghua University) Nos. 1, 2 and 3.” After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, Tsinghua University moved to the south of China and many books were gravely damaged. The partially burnt, scorched pages of these Chinese books and manuscripts attest equally to the long history of suffering caused by global conflicts in the twentieth century and to the constant risk of the effacement of historical memory whether caused by accident or deliberately.
Oil on canvas. Stretched.
This artwork is currently on display in EXPO CHICAGO satellite show “Musings of Calm with Past + Present Chinese Art.” Available to ship on April 11, 2022.
