Text / Wang Paopao

According to artist He Xiaoquan, Feifei Run is his "Personal Label". 

As a curator, however, I'd rather see it as a phase of life, a delirious dream of someone who has lost his head in the harsh sun of Yunnan, who has mixed up his days and nights in that sketchy residential complex where he lives - "The City of Tomorrow", that's what it's called - and someone whose nerve is constantly being hit by an overload of friendship, alcohol and capricious love affairs…

He Xiaoquan ran away from the opening of Feifei Run's first solo exhibition in 2017. He arranged for a friend who was said to look like him to stand in for him during the opening ceremony and even to give a "moving" speech in Feifei Run's name, while the artist himself went to confess his love to a girl in a little town in the middle of Yunnan.

"Spring Is A Good Time For Feeling Hungry" is Feifei Run's second solo exhibition, and I really wish to see these "doodles" - all of which so colorful, crazy, emotional, passionate and sad - as a dream of Xiaoquan's, or his divorce from it. As for whether to turn the breakup into a "label" - that's entirely up to him. 

It is said that Xiaoquan wasn't a good student even when he was studying printmaking at China Academy of Art. He was such a pathological dreamer that he never accepted any confirmation of reality, and this attitude has only grown worse as time passes. Reality repulses him even more than he repulses reality. He keeps wondering how he can be likable and still remains himself.

Is Feifei Run likable? Is it still He Xiaoquan himself? I don't know, but I like it anyway. 

I like these paintings. They are sentimental punkers, loud alcoholics, shameless desire and fiercely loathsome self-mockery. They are nights of youth that have been wasted in the search for the most direct, precise and emotional expression of colors. 

What's the point of rambling on? If "Spring Is A Good Time For Feeling Hungry", why not be hungry in a more transparent, distracted and erratic way and vow to ravish everything one can see but cannot devour?