Xiao Jiang: Mountains
2017.9.10-2017.10.29
Artists: Xiao Jiang
Xiao Jiang’s landscape series is inspired by the photographs he took whiletravelling in the Jinggang Mountain, his hometown, and Zhejiang. With mountain roads surfacing naturally fromthe space between the finely overlayed color patches and the brushstrokes,these landscape-themed paintings are more than painting from life --- theyspeak about painting via landscape. According to Calvino, once bound by words, the images in our memory would geterased in reality, but Xiao’s painting proved that theair and clue of the mountains become all the more clear and tangible when thelandscape is transferred onto the canvas. Rolling mountains, from near to far,always build a solid intersection with a certain starting point, forming apoetic picture with distant mountainsand roads close at hand. Running across the mountain are not only things fromthe objective world but also precisionist lines and planes. The significance ofthese paintings goes further than the mountains, the roads, the trees and thefog and lies beyond the artworks themselves. The figures in the paintings, intheir turn, seem to grow out of the mountain and head for the far distance. “In the Mountain” reminds us of two linesfrom a famous Chinese poem: the view provides some veritable truth, but mydefining words seem to me uncouth.