Exhibition Review｜Shi Xiang: Cotton

When I first entered Shi Xiang’s studio, the artist used cotton, anonymous fruits, saint fruit and other creative elements to hang all over the wall, wrapping up the whole space at once, letting the viewer immerse himself in the works as if they were music. He utilizes charcoal and ink as simple drawing tools, and the constant repetition of brushstrokes and scratches may seem ordinary and clumsy, but they are full of tension, and the artist sees all things with an enlightened mind. The seemingly figurative shapes depict the infinite and bring out the imperceptible.

Cotton is a soft fiber, its softness symbolizes warmth and comfort, and it also has some symbolic meanings in culture. Shi Xiang uses the theme of cotton to solve and explore the problem of painting in a way of “peeling the onion”, expressing the emotional story in the artist’s heart. In his works, the seemingly soft cotton is not only a title, but also breaks the traditional order, collides between figurative and abstract, and uses black and white to write out the depth and texture, delicacy and sensitivity, fragility and toughness, figurative and expressive, fullness and power, creating a strong visual experience. Cotton painted by Shi Xiang goes beyond the meaning of plant itself, and the artist’s half-abstract and half-realistic approach gives the picture a more spiritual nature, giving rise to many associations, and it is not too much to associate it with a woman’s form. The works are full of simple and abstract Zen reflections, poetically expressing his thoughts on the current spirit of the times and the artist’s deepest personal state of mind. The artist repeats his labor every day, and he knows that the power of repetition is infinite. The contradiction and harmony of the lines in the picture, the order and division, and the change of the intensity of black, white and grey are the artist’s deconstruction and re-cognition after many years of learning in the college background, and it is the deeper understanding of the shape, volume, and even the essence of the object, and the cotton is no longer a terminology definition. “Cotton” here is the artist’s inner myth, religion-like spiritual leadership.