Oct. 4-24, 2024
Curated by Richard Vine
Opening reception:
Oct. 5, 2024, 5-7 pm, with a performance by the artist at 6:00 pm
Dialogue between Xin Song and Richard Vine:
Oct. 24, 5-6 pm
“Chaos and Belief,” a midcareer solo exhibition by Beijing-born, New York-based artist Xin Song, challenges every preconception viewers might have about Chinese papercutting. A folk art form with a roughly 2,000-year history, cutting paper into intricate abstract patterns or stylized representations of people, flora, animals, or mixed scenes, is a traditional way of decorating walls and window, giving small gifts, and marking special occasions such as holidays, birthdays, or anniversaries.
Like all forms of “feudal” cultural legacy, this practice was suppressed or neglected during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when Socialist Realism was the one-and-only officially sanctioned art style in China. Only after the death of Mao Zedong, when both traditionalism and experimentation reemerged, did papercutting win recognition as a modern-art practice.
Key to that historic breakthrough was the artist Lu Shengzhong, who pioneered the use of large-scale cut paper installations with a contemporary resonance. Song studied with Lu at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in the early 1990s, then assisted him with his international exhibitions until 2000. All the while, she was developing her own distinct aesthetic—less symmetrical, more multicolored, and thematically brasher than her mentor’s.
Curated by art critic Richard Vine, “Chaos and Belief” is a compact survey of Song’s recent work, emphasizing both its formal diversity and its playful yet deeply serious intent. The selection reveals that Song’s most popular works—those that highlight quilt-like patterns or floral motifs—stand halfway between the two poles of her ongoing artistic concern. One is the emotional turmoil at the center of our psychic life, personal and collective; the other is our capacity for altruistic commitment. Thus images of flowers, stylized waves, and decorative abstractions share the gallery space with a huge, turbulent installation whose twisting and curling paper streamers seem to explode from the wall. Offsetting this visual outburst is an orderly display of cutout portrait heads of some of the artist’s moral heroes—Che Guevara, Aung San Suu Kyi, Hilary Clinton, Bruce Lee, Laozi, and others.
In some instances, the personage’s eyes stare at us defiantly; in others, the eyes have been excised, making the face a paper mask we could imaginatively slip on. One exceptional case, featuring Bill Clinton’s image paired with the word “Grope” (in place of Hope), replaces iconic inspiration with satire. Perhaps it’s an acknowledgment that even good leaders can have deep ethical flaws, as Homer and the Greek tragedy-writers knew so well.
The complexity of Song’s vision places her in dialogue with other practitioners of global contemporary papercutting. Her work is edgier than that of Britain’s comforting Rob Ryan—the paper strips in some of Song’s earlier innocuous-seeming compositions were cut from porn magazines—but not as directly confrontational as Kara Walker’s classic antiracist silhouette nightmares. Song’s installations, which fill and animate large spaces, resonate with the cardboard extravaganzas of Thomas Hirsh, and both artists owe a debt to the modernist master Kurt Schwitters and his legendary Merzbau. Jess and many other 20th century collagists are clearly antecedents, and some viewers might detect a hint of painter Charles Burchfield in Song’s jittery, vibrating way of constructing organic forms.
In her opening-night performance, Song will rapidly, volcanically, fill an entire wall with cut and pinned paper. This galvanizing act, a living mélange of materiality and force, combines elements of Western performance art and Happenings with the longstanding East Asian belief that an artist can be a medium for the flow of the cosmic-organic energy known as qi.
—Richard Vine
