肖江- 山外山 

Xiao Jiang - The Distant Mountains

Duration：2021.12.11 - 2022.01.23
Opening：2021.12.11   15:00

Academic Adviser: Lu Mingjun

Platform China Contemporary Art Institute 

Platform China Contemporary Art Institute is honored to hold Xiao Jiang's solo exhibition "The Distant Mountains" on December 11, 2021, presenting his latest works from 2018 to 2021. Hosted by Lu Mingjun, this exhibition is the second solo exhibition of Xiao Jiang at Platform China after "A Navigation Mark Without a River" in 2012.

A beam of white light strung all these works. It not only traverses the inner and outer spaces but also blocks them; it creates a traversing and unknowable time and space, thus immersing the entire exhibition in a vague sense of anxiety. This also means that for Xiao Jiang, there is no difference between the inside and outside scenery. Those rusty landscapes, those indoor spaces shrouded in white light, and those figures trapped in it are, in the end, the artist's imagination and fiction. Xiao Jiang is unwilling to provide an exact explanation and conceptual orientation for every work. In some sense, the reason he obstructed viewing (such as wiping out the characters' faces or always facing the audience with their backs) implies that this is ultimately an enclosed world, and there is no need to explain anything to the outside. Just like Xiao Jiang himself, he rarely discusses his creation of art. What he wants to express is already in his painting, and there is no need to say anything. The so-called "mountain beyond the mountain" still refers to a position in the middle of it, and this is a fable.

Xiao Jiang's recent paintings are divided into two parts: outdoor landscapes and indoor scenery. The artist himself may have no intention of this, but coincidentally, this inside and outside form a whole.

In depicting these natural landscapes, Xiao Jiang has maintained the basic perspective structure, but the form and texture has yet gone far from the original image. The actual lush, layered, winding mountains were reduced to a superposition of hard-edged planar geometric shapes (mainly triangular) as if they were a landscape installation. It is hard to say whether the scenic moment under the strong backlight is morning or dusk, but they all convey an inexplicable melancholy and gloom. In portraying indoor and outdoor scenery, the characters in the painting play a vital role. Xiao Jiang disdains to reproduce a photo faithfully; he is more concerned about the relationship between the form of the character and the space. In most cases, the combination of characters and the surrounding space structure does not violate the harmony and faintly convey a trace of alienation and loneliness. It can be said that the whole scene is a dream of the person in the painting. And this kind of emotion permeates almost all the portrayals of indoor scenery.