The Knight of Wasteland
2023.7.29 - 2023.8.27
Venue: D06, Middle 2nd St., 798 Art Zone, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Rd, BJOpening hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10:30-18:30
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Tong Gallery+Projects is honored to announce that the project The Knight of Wasteland will be open from July 29th (Sat), 2023 to August 27th (Sun), 2023, during which the artists XIE Shan's latest artworks will be presented. Look forward to seeing you there!Xie Shan is not a professional artist and has never received a systematic art education. During his childhood, Xie Shan became addicted to painting, so much so that after dropping out of school at the age of fifteen, he was able to fully devote himself to painting, and a large amount of copying and sketching continued for nearly six years. Until 1994, he began to suffer from frequent auditory hallucinations and even jumped off the third floor as a result. Subsequently, he was diagnosed with congenital schizophrenia. In September of the same year, Xie Shan stopped painting alone and moved into a mental hospital.
“The Room in a Psychiatric Hospital“ was created by Xie Shan in 2022, when he had already left the ward and returned to his almost fanatical solo painting. Most of the works in the exhibition were painted by Xie Shan in the past two years. After leaving Chongqing and settling in Chengdu, he described a lot of people and Natural landscape in his memory. Compared to works from twenty years ago, the real scenes in the painting are wrapped in colorful fantasies, and even completely replace reality as the painting itself.
The Knight Of Wasteland
by Xiao BinRed, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple, who holds the color training to dance in the air. The subtle light and strange colors are like fresh air that moistens the whole body and mind. This is the first time I saw Xie Shan's works.Later, I watched many of his paintings from different times intermittently, and the innocent and lively atmosphere in the paintings was like a child, giving people a pure and moving visual comfort. The dense arrangement of high-purity bright colors does not have any sense of disorder in the picture. In some works, it presents the childlike charm of Miro's works and the romantic and orderly music score of Kandinsky's pen. A little pause and gaze in front of these paintings, the shadows of these masters are difficult to trace, leaving behind the simple and novel Xie Shan, the interlude that transcends all the difficulties of survival, Painter Xie Shan, who transcends the physical obstacles created by heaven and directly expresses his soul.The concepts of contemporary art or the realistic depiction techniques have not been able to cover the main theme of Xie Shan's paintings, namely "truth" and "emotion". After leaving his hometown in Chongqing, he painted the simple old man in his memory; A woman cooking; The kindergarten in his hometown, the hillside behind the mountain, and so on. After arriving in Chengdu, the mountains and rivers of his hometown gradually faded away. However, during the period when his new urban impression had not yet naturally entered his heart, he painted many forests, which were partially different from the previous depiction of the forest in his hometown. In the distant future, it should be an emotional loss of the artist when he passed by the city park and saw the trees connecting the scenery of his hometown. Xie Shan is not good at communicating with people. In the past decade of social interaction, he often sent a few words about his daily life, such as the children he saw passing by the park and the items left by the roadside. Later, these urban views gradually became part of his paintings.Xie Shan's paintings, whether it's "The Town on the Mountain" or "The Knight Who Passes Through", always evoke a touch of less everyday emotion. Bright and not sad or joyful.
