Man and Woman
Xia Xiaowan
夏小万
Production date
2007
Object Detail
Media
chinagraph pencil, tinted glass, stainless steel
Measurements
174 x 121 x 81 cm
Notes
Xia Xiaowan has always had mixed feelings about reality. As a child, he says, he actually feared it. Art was his shield: it allowed him to engage with the world without leaving the safety of his imagination. His favourite
subjects are human beings, but their forms arise from his imagination like sea creatures from the deep, refracted through “the different dimensions of my inner self”. “I don’t have the brain for realism,” Xia Xiaowan says.
Instead, he seeks a truer vision than eyes alone afford. It was the quest to give his creations life and depth that led him to develop what he calls spatial painting. Inspired by medical CT scans, he deconstructs an image as if he were slicing up a body, then repaints it section by section on narrowly separated sheets of glass. The results are substantial yet ghostly, with depth that defies perspective and shapes that dissolve when seen from the side. At once hideous and pitiful, Man and Woman might be hobgoblins in a nightmare or mutants fleeing nuclear war. Xia Xiaowan is attracted to forms—like those in Goya’s paintings—that are ambiguous, unnatural, offbalance; forms that “make me feel uncomfortable”, he says. He wants his paintings to have a similar effect.
When friends say they are ugly, he replies that their inner truth makes them beautiful: “Let the figures fight and struggle. A little fear and suffering make a work of art come alive.”
subjects are human beings, but their forms arise from his imagination like sea creatures from the deep, refracted through “the different dimensions of my inner self”. “I don’t have the brain for realism,” Xia Xiaowan says.
Instead, he seeks a truer vision than eyes alone afford. It was the quest to give his creations life and depth that led him to develop what he calls spatial painting. Inspired by medical CT scans, he deconstructs an image as if he were slicing up a body, then repaints it section by section on narrowly separated sheets of glass. The results are substantial yet ghostly, with depth that defies perspective and shapes that dissolve when seen from the side. At once hideous and pitiful, Man and Woman might be hobgoblins in a nightmare or mutants fleeing nuclear war. Xia Xiaowan is attracted to forms—like those in Goya’s paintings—that are ambiguous, unnatural, offbalance; forms that “make me feel uncomfortable”, he says. He wants his paintings to have a similar effect.
When friends say they are ugly, he replies that their inner truth makes them beautiful: “Let the figures fight and struggle. A little fear and suffering make a work of art come alive.”
Accession number
2007.074