Meat, Desire, Fertility, Prison – Xie Chengxuan

Xie Chengxuan’s new collection “Meat, Desire, Fertility, Prison” appears to be an ideological fist fight, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning.   It sets out to mock the current affairs and appears to force mind control, but all it really does is celebrate the physical and mental transformation of a young artist.

Xie’s journey to London has given him an overhaul of creative questionings.  At the Royal College of Art, he was constantly pushed to revisit his primal stimulation and fear, from cultural heritage, differences to artistic inspiration.   Challenged by his peers on motifs and execution, Xie began to embark on a process of deconstruction, breaking down layers and compositional buildups that was once his signature.  Once a clean slate he would embrace the freedom of essentialist creation – painting organically where each line, color, and brushwork speaks loudly on their own.  Most importantly, all of these would be brought together under contrasting narratives – goddess next to a pig or an angel urinating into a pond, thereby creating a canvas of incoherence and contradictions.   

Xie has grown up in a melting pot and now he is a multi-culturalist. I realize that calling him a multi-culturalist   — just like that — is to stereotype him a little. But this collection apparently gives us all the contradicting elements – meat, desire, fertility and prison – and focuses on primal cravings as well as spiritual torture.  Then comes music.  Xie likes Shostakovich a lot where his music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque, and ambivalent tonality.

Now Xie’s subjects are not the kind of sat-upon, working-class anti-hero we got in the angry British culture of the early 1960s. Nor are they the social elitists aiming to explain their inner workings or take apart his society.  Indeed, there is not much to take apart, as Xie views society as smart-nose pop-art abstractions.   This collection is more than a trendy décor but a future world in his imagination.

With reference to George Orwell’s dystopian account of a future totalitarian state, does the artist really want us to identify with the co-existence of constant contradictions?  In a world where society is cynical and polarized, of course, a good man must live outside the norm.  But that isn’t what Xie is saying, he seems to be implying something simpler and more frightening: that in a world where society is cynical and polarized, the citizen might as well be a cynic and schizophrenic, too.

Henry Au-yeung

September 2024