This exhibition is showing more than ten latest paintings created by the artist during 2011 to 2012.
Since 2009, 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 visual level. Compared with his works on canvas, the translucent silk could highlight the immateriality – a physical diffuse reflection space composed of light, silk, frames and pigments, physically transcending the regular figure-ground relationship of 2D paintings – of the visual sense itself which pursued by Xie Fan. Thus, it seems that the viewers could see the moment when the object projected on their retinas, and their eyesight turns back to Plato’s “cave”, demonstrating the nature of visual sense in a dialectical way.
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 in 1983 in Jiangyou, Sichuan Province and graduated from Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. Currently lives and works in Beijing.