The World Order

When people talk about Morandi, they always say, “The Italian painter who painted rows of bottles.” When I watch the solo exhibition curated by Zhu He at NUOVO Gallery, I would say that Shi Xiang is a painter who painted cotton. Through the same thing, how can a painter see the similarity in the differences and the differences in the same. This kind of subtle analyzing and pursuing is the unique work of a painter, especially a painter who paints still lifes like Shi Xiang. From object to painting, that is, painting is object, spring with object, and light and dust, this is the irreplaceable significance of still-life painting in contemporary times. This is the irreplaceable significance of still-life painting in contemporary times, because the alienation of objects and the final conclusion of painting are calling us to reconstruct the relationship between objects and human beings. Speechlessness is the way of speaking in still-life paintings, which is also what Gadamer called “the unsaid image”. Shi Xiang’s paintings of cotton are mainly embodied in shapes, because the color of his works is black, and he uses monochrome to minimize the color, reflecting only the order of the world in the lines, and man’s desire for spiritual order. If technicism has brought darkness to things, then it is necessary to return to the things themselves, to what Heidegger called “listening to the Word” and “the poetic dwelling of man”.

When a writer faces a thing, he may think about the meaning of the thing; when a painter faces a thing, he observes the shape of the thing and its generating texture. I think, when Shi Xiang faces cotton, he will not produce literary imagination and meaning exploration of cotton, but observe the shape of cotton, the support point of the line, the three-dimensional and spatial sense brought by the color and lightness. He will unfold his painting work in the taking of images and the use of painting materials. He works like a craftsman, he is not creating in the general sense, but is restoring things as they are. A friend of mine who is involved in philosophy said that the so-called still life is not static, but things are moving in their own ecology. When a painter paints a still life, he is not painting a static thing, a dead thing, but a thing full of its own life, a living thing. For example, if we say, “It’s raining heavily outside.” Wouldn’t you consider not going out at this time, or taking an umbrella with you if you have to go out? What would your reaction be if an artist painted a picture like “It’s raining heavily outside”? Similarly, when Shi Xiang paints cotton, you don’t need to fertilize it or pick it, but you may be confronted with a sentence that contains words, phrases, sentences, punctuation, syntax, and a sense of language. Shi Xiang’s paintings of cotton don’t require us to cope with cotton, cotton is not something we cope with, cotton exists as something that exists.

To be a still-life painter all the time may not be Shi Xiang’s creative ambition. So, when we see the cotton painted by Shi Xiang, what do we see? We see images. The earliest iconography can be traced back to the Italian scholar Cesare Lipa’s “Iconography” at the end of the 16th century, whose book was mainly a textual description of a variety of symbolic themes, and which was reprinted at the beginning of the 17th century, when he greatly enriched the number of symbolic themes and increased the number of prints and illustrations, so that this book became a basic tool for the poets and artists to draw upon in their creations. The iconography focuses on the transmission, development, and specific connotations of the themes of the images in different histories. From this idea of art history, when we face Shi Xiang’s cotton, we will naturally explore the pre-images of each of his works, describe and analyze the present images, as well as develop an interpretation of the images, which are the three levels at which we can recognize the works. Through image interpretation and image research, we not only pay attention to the specific historical and cultural attributes conveyed by Shi Xiang’s completed images, but also analyze the historical and social connotations behind them. We cannot limit ourselves to the aesthetics of the image itself, but pay more attention to the connection between the image and history. Because history is the background of the era in which the image was created, through the image we can understand the society that the image restores.