Hua Xiyu: Midsummer Trance

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Following the first solo exhibition “Chasing the Wind and Shadows” of Hua Xiyu’s work in 2019, Wei Gallery is honoured to present the solo exhibition “Midsummer Trance” in collaboration with artist Hua Xiyu on 7th June 2023, featuring a series of oil paintings from 2019 to 2023. Specializing in capturing fleeting light and shadows, Hua’s paintings exude a quiet and solid visual impression, making her a contemporary artist with a distinctive style based on her pure colours and unique compositions.

Unlike her previous works with a focus on the static state, she has injected a stronger sense of life into this series “Midsummer Trance”. The movement of humans and animals is largely depicted in this series, as well as a large number of curved lines to make the static images flow, enhancing the sense of movement and presenting the rhythm of life in nature.

In this series, her works emphasize the importance of perception, such as the ears that appear in the conch listening to the stories that the ocean brings from afar. The artist hopes that the viewer can feel the emotion of the painting not only visually, but also through a profound experience that awakens the other senses, like a moment of encountering a sound, a smell, a taste, or a touch on the body that transports one to a special moment in the past.

Hua’s works are full of rhythm and flow. Her paintings include elements such as landscapes and animals, capturing fleeting thoughts or images. The appearance of landscapes is often used to position the scene and complement the flow of emotions, and the curves reinforce the dynamism of the picture, bringing out the movement of life. In the “Swing” created in 2019, which depicted a panda lying on its mother’s swinging belly, the scene was then transformed into the water in an attempt to continue the sense of movement onto a swim ring. This sensation of swaying was further deepened in her “Ice Floe” created in 2020, where the warm body melted into the hard ice, seemingly deepening the sense of undulating movement. Continuing into “Snow Butterfly” created in 2022, a butterfly is depicted hovering in the falling snow, capturing the rhythm of snowflakes floating down.

The final piece in this series, “Heart Flame,” features fire and ice, two extreme forms of stimulation to the skin, serving as the artist’s response to the question of “whether a mussel feels pain when being cut”. The viewer is invited to immerse themselves in the world of “Midsummer Trance” and experience the fusion of nature and life, reflecting on moments of perception and illusion.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

1986 Born in Yunnan Lijiang, China
2009 Graduated from Visual Communication Department, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute 2010 Graduated from Studio 10 in the School of Design,Central Academy of Fine Arts Currently lives and works in Beijing

In terms of the language of the paintings, Hua punctures the construction of imaginations, that is, through the media of painting, paintings are restored as “photos” – a medium different from classical painting. Those intentionally left shapes and lines, as well as the saturated and pure colors, all highlight her “impressionistic” approach when she captured the fleeting light, neat as the feeling of pressing the shutter. At the same time, she realized that the sketching object she was facing was no longer a natural state, but a plane simulated by electronic media in the chip. Therefore, she allocated the composition, exaggerating the dull parts of the plane that came from the digital products, to make the picture sharp and decisive. In some other works, the color blocks are first painted subconsciously and the artist looks for Déjà vu in the photos she collected. Her “discovery”, however, is not based only on coincidence, but on the rhythmic resonance between the two. In other words, whether it is Lijiang or Beijing, memory or reality, photography or color blocks, Hua’s painting always revolves around its own unique and clear rhythm.