Oil painting is as foreign to the Chinese visual tradition as kung pao chicken is to Western cuisine. “A Gift Like Kung Pao Chicken,” the title of Xie Nanxing’s solo premiere in London, underscored the artist’s sense of how his work is acculturated in a global context. But perhaps instead of the exhibition being a gift, it’s more like a gift exchange.
At Thomas Dane Gallery’s No. 3 Duke Street space, in a room painted scallion green to add a new flavor to the conventional white cube, a number of paintings from Xie’s “Spices” series, 2016–17, previously exhibited at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, could be seen in a broader interpretive context. Viewers in London who are presumably more erudite in Western art history might have identified Spice No. 3, 2016, with a number of variations of the classic modernist motif of the nude descending the staircase, deployed by artists ranging from Marcel Duchamp and Gerhard Richter to Jana Euler. Applying paint in broad strokes that barely coat the canvas, Xie has effaced any definitive details, with the exception of only a parrot, depicted in fine lines, as an incongruent add-on next to the hand of the front figure. The bird’s exotic nature undermines the “authenticity” of the motif; in the eyes of “the other,” the Western canon is merely another visual source. Xie’s choice of the parrot, symbolic of mimicry, not only evokes the many artists who have employed this motif, but also projects his own identity as that of someone whom Westerners might perceive as an exotic imitator, like the bird. In this sense, Xie’s intention for Spice No. 1, 2016, is not necessarily that it be in accord with Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia, ca. 1570–76. Similarly, he is not aligning Spice No. 7, 2017, which features added diagrammatic arrows, with Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. Rather, he wishes to underscore his open acknowledgment of and unburdened attitude toward the European canon, and thus to reinvent the tradition.
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