Entitled “The Layer”, Xie Fan’s latest solo exhibition held at White Space, Beijing shows his recent series of gorgeous paintings on silk. The artist mixes modern painting techniques with the Chinese artistic tradition of painting on silk for a stunning effect.

Since 2009, the young artist Xie Fan started trying to shift the oil painting on canvas onto silk. The seemingly simple decision did not aim at going back to embrace the cultural delight of traditional Chinese paintings, but was based on his consecutive form on a visual level. Compared with his works on canvas, the translucent silk could highlight the immaterial – a physical diffuse reflective space composed of light, silk, frames and pigments, physically transcending the regular figure-ground relationship of 2D paintings – of the visual sense itself which was pursued by Xie Fan. Thus, it seems that the viewers could see the moment when the object projected onto their retinas, and their eyesight turns back to Plato’s “cave”, demonstrating the nature of a visual sense in a dialectical way.

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In the scope of optics, especially in the context of video-recording or photography, “Jing Shen” (Chinese Pinyin of “the layers”) means the depth of field within which one can make clear images. The exhibition employs this concept to indicate the visual relation between Xie Fan’s art practice and modern optics, and also to remind the viewers to notice the structure of the works themselves – the English title of this exhibition also manifests this.

Xie Fan was born in1983 in Jiangyou,Sichuan Province and graduated from Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. Currently living and working in Beijing.

About the Exhibition

Date: March 25th - April 24th, 2012

Venue: White Space Beijing

Address: NO.255 Caochangdi, Airport Service Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing

Tel: +86 10 84562054

Fax: + 86 10 84562749

Email: info@whitespace-beijing.com

Opening Hours: Tues--Sun 10am -- 6pm

Courtesy of the artist and White Space Beijing.