Mocube gallery is proudly present you the latest works of Qi“ Xiaguo(hereby as Qi):Pixel puzzle”. The exhibition starts from the 4th of August 2016 to the 5th of October 2016.

Qi has created an automatic painting machine, and he has his unique color mixing system, this system is form of two parts, the software and the hardware, through the imitation of manual color mixing methods, he could precisely mixed the paint, and the methodology was to add in black and white into tricolor, it could freely mix all kinds of colors that has different brightness, and uses XYZ tri-axial positioning and magnetic pulse to blow out those mixed color out by the program.

Qi’s painting machine’s main characteristic is its digital mode; the images from his works are also the images from our lives, television, and the Internet, those pictures are being highly focused, rapidly uploaded, downloaded, and zipped, so those images are in bad quality, low pixel, and with chromatic aberration, and the differentiation between high quality image and low quality pictures formed the “level” or “class” for these pictures. However, Qi re-edited these “low quality” images, and through the method of thick drip propylene pigment, he has produced images with orderly fashion, and delicate tactile with mechanical aesthetic concepts. Through the improvement of its aesthetic concepts, he has turned them into “pixel” image with controversial relationships. Of course, these pictures are divided into figurative and abstractive form from the first impression, but they are actually abstractive, it’s a progress of a figurative image being “interacted” and disappear, it’s created under abstractive concepts.

These “pixels” with physical characteristics has built a visual barrier within the space that the canvas itself, compare with other blurry images, these special materialized “pixel” could suddenly bring our attention back to the surface of the canvas, and our visual attention might be dragged in and out from the surface of the canvas and what’s deep within. It’s as if we could observe the unrealistic world behind the glass, not only that we could feel the barrier created by the screen, but also we could felt it around us, this is how the painting machine’s tri-axis XYZ shows.

We could also find those “barriers” in our real life，it is“wall”we called it, except those natural or manufacture barriers (physical barriers), there are also barriers like mental barriers, time barriers, digit barriers, surreal barriers, and geographical barriers, and barriers are the blockage and the quarantine of truth, set by the authorities in the information society. Therefore, it only goes one direction. Just as what Herbert Marcuse described as a society of one dimension and a one-dimension individual.

The exhibition also presents two pieces of “Bronze statue”, if we considered Qi is 4.0 industrial methods to do reverse archeology on ancient paintings, and to discover new possibilities. So, those “Bronze statues” also wants to use this “reverse archeology” method to reach the “peak” of the “bronze age”, in order to re-examine today’s problems.

Qi’s works contains the complicated relationships between power worship, the evolution of technology, and the transformation of beliefs.