Shi Xiang: Cotton

The exhibition presented Shi Xiang’s recent Cotton series, which continues the thinking of the artists of the classical era about still life, and minimizes color, replacing it with a renewed perception of the object, and an understanding of shape, volume, and even the essence of the object.

The leading artists of the Post-80s have their own different outlook, which is finally expressed in the form of visual art, and they can be called the New Visual Generation. Artists of Shi Xiang’s generation are not bound by traditional concepts and have a very strong enterprising spirit; moreover, they are willing to think about the history of their own country and nation, and do a lot of work to carry on the past and the future. It is under such thinking that Shi Xiang utilizes charcoal and ink to reorganize the Chinese still life, which is a non-Western celebration of materiality, but a poetic exploration of the soul of the still life in the East. From Muxi, Qian Xuan to Qi Baishi, the artist has re-explored the neglected aspects of the everyday life of still life fruits and melons. This is one of the most moving aspects of Shi Xiang’s works, as he abandons all the interfering factors given by desire, and uses his most simple and austerity-like way of repeating the lines to open up a new path to the object itself, which we often overlook. At the same time, it should also be pointed out that artists of Shi Xiang’s generation are not only limited to their own families, nationalities and countries, but they can also expand their horizons to the whole world, and acquire the inheritance of global civilization. What appears in their works is no longer a mainstream concept, but a hundred flowers instead of a thousand laws, and rules and orders can be broken in their opinion, and they can be built up after they are broken, and there is no doubt that this generation has a lot to say about this. In this generation, Shi Xiang is undoubtedly one of the most sincere artists.