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Xiaoze Xie: Confrontation and Disruption
Xie is an unusually alert observer of the harsh realities of present-day politics around the globe and how these realities are depicted in Western and Chinese newspapers and social media.
"This is a lengthy span of history and memory. Then coming back to this exhibition, time is shortened to merely one day. Like a daily newspaper in today’s media. In the beginning, I was painting a silent pile of newspapers, like a still-life, lying on the shelves of the library." - Xiaoze Xie
December 7-8, 2013, I.N.Y.T. (International New York Times), 2015
February 3, 2007, L.G.D.S. No. 1 (La Gazzetta dello Sport), 2007
“What is the role of a daily newspaper?” This is the question posed to us in Paintings by Xiaoze Xie: Confrontation and Disruption, the second exhibition of Xie’s work at the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery. A newspaper, often skimmed in a hurry, discarded once consumed, may not immediately strike viewers as art, which is savored slowly, revisited time after time. But Xie transforms news into poetry as he blurs the lines between painter, writer, commentator, and critic. On his canvasses, Xie asks us to consider history and memory, archiving and forgetting, ideology and communication, transparency and transformation, chatter versus substance, fragment and whole. As the United States questions its ideological past and future, Stanford in Washington exhibits Xiaoze Xie’s works at a formative time and fitting place, in the nation’s capital.
