Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the presentation of Mao Xuhui's latest solo exhibition, "Clue", on July 13, 2024 at 4pm at Beijing 1st Space. Curated by Dai Zhuoqun, this exhibition features more than twenty of Mao Xuhui's most recent paintings, using everyday objects and feelings around him as clues.
Mao Xuhui’s Recent Works: Surroundings as Clues
Text by Dai Zhuoqun
A glowing sheep and a night-roaming cat both embodies the artist's spirit, traversing the dark void.
This void is as desolate as the universe, yet as cramped as the corridor outside the studio door.
In the past four, five years, the artist has rarely ventured out, except for a few distant trips—once to Guishan for sketching and twice to Beijing and Chengdu to attend the opening of his solo exhibitions.
Guarding one's territory and losing their longing for the outside world. Ironically, the world suddenly becomes clearer with every detail, big or small, around them becoming familiar and tangible. Throughout, the painter's world has slowly been shaped by their life and habits, primarily in two spaces: home and the studio. And for someone who paints, the studio is undoubtedly the real domain.
In Kunming's old city, there is a factory complex called Chuangku on Xiba Road, preserving the appearance of the 1980s and 1990s. It used to be the production workshop of a precision machinery factory. The painter's studio is located on the second floor of a narrow alley, accessible via a steep and high staircase. Over the years, it has fallen into disrepair, always feeling fragile and precarious, as if it might collapse at any moment. The decaying house, with rows of red brick walls, scattered iron railings, and an abundance of electrical wires, cables, and ropes crisscrossing, hanging diagonally and winding around everywhere, whether they are functional or not.
At present, these glances naturally return inward to the immediate, the nearby, to what is real and tangible. The existential thoughts of the painter's youth, the passion for modernist painting, and the turbulence of expressionism have all quietly settled into a gradually calming new context.
The ups and downs of an artistic career, distant Guishan, spiritual home, utopia; the forces of enlightenment, critique, and reform; the vocabulary of power, patriarchy, the central seat of authority; scissors, the normalization of power in everyday life; the everyday objects, the compassion for the humble, the epic plots, will and eternity...
Nowadays, the artist has internalized his spirit. At this moment, the artist is reborn, everything existing within everything. Clues are all around, with all images and symbols merging with the self.
The artist seems to have returned to his original starting point, back to private space, to the self, to inward life painting. Yet, it is different. The artist has acquired a new kind of freedom—the freedom to view things without distinction. The new figuration thus radiates new life. The images appearing in all the pictures now are just carriers of current thoughts, no longer fixed images with corresponding references.
Images have gained freedom, and the artist has become a self-sufficient person. A self-sufficient person is a free person.
Seeing the present and the nearby brings unexpected joy. This joy, for now, seems to be enduring. The Melia tree outside the window has bloomed with yellow flowers, the glowing sheep burns fiercely in the darkness, and the bougainvillea on Xiba Road flourishes. Even in the cold night, the wild cats have their own territory.
Three years ago, the artist started to repaint two long-lost works—The Lost Mother of Red Earth and The Lost Four Goats. Compared to the original paintings, the artist has used larger canvases to address his long-held regrets. At this moment, we are here, and we too will eventually be lost, just like those lost paintings. To live means to fight against loss—the glowing sheep, the chair on the roof, the cat on the chair...
A narrow corridor, an old studio, filled with endless clues.
EXHIBITING WORKS
Artists
Mao Xuhui
Mao Xuhui was born in Chongqing in June 1956. He has been living in Kunming since September 1956 when his parents, called on by the state, moved to the southwestern city to support the country’s border area development. He graduated from junior high school in 1971 and was subsequently assigned a job as warehouse worker at the Kunming Department Store. Meanwhile, he began to study sketch drawing and had his first encounter with gouache and oil painting. He was enrolled in 1977 by the Kunming Teachers College as an undergraduate majoring in oil painting at the Department of Art. In 1982, he graduated from the Yunnan Art Academy (which had been merged with the KTC in 1962 and then separated from it in 1980) and then returned to work at the department store. He was transferred in 1984 to the Kunming Film Company where he worked primarily as a movie poster painter. Between 1985 and 1989, he brought together a host of young artists mostly from Yunnan and Sichuan under the banner of “New Figurative” to form the Southwest Art Research Group, whose members represented and celebrated in their paintings such intense life awareness typical of the southwestern regions of China that the group came to represent a significant part of the ’85 New Wave, a vanguard movement of contemporary Chinese art. With his long-term unpaid leave approved by the film company in 1993, he became a devoted professional artist, participating in illustrious exhibitions hosted by renowned art institutions across the globe. His works have been collected by prominent domestic and international galleries and museums, publicized worldwide by news media, and published in art history books and academic journals. In 2001, he became a professor at the School of Art and Design of Yunnan University, where he worked as director of the Second Studio of the Department of Art, creating the “field teaching” methodology, committing himself to the development of students and young artists, and bringing to the fore for contemporary Chinese art a cohort of “Yunnan seeds,” namely promising young artists with great potentials. He retired from Yunnan University in 2016.
Curator
Dai Zhuoqun
Dai Zhuoqun, independent curator, art critic, lives and works in Beijing. He was the founder of Contemporary Art Magazine in 2007, served as editor and art director. In 2009, Dai launched and jointly organized the "Warm Winter Plan"--Beijing safeguard art rights, which became one of the most significant art events in recent years. He cooperates with a number of art institutions, colleges and Museums of fine arts, planning exhibitions and giving lectures. Meanwhile, he frequently writes for domestic and international professional journals and publications. The exhibitions he curated includes: "The Awakening of Things”,"Superfluous Things" series projects, "Civilization" series projects,“Brushwork and True Feeling”,”Approach Spirits”,”Free Prism Video Wave”,“ The Circular impact:Video Art 21”.