June 2021
Xiao Jiang, “The Big Room”, 2020 , oil on canvas, 200 × 360 cm
The exhibition “Mountains Aside” is an invitation letter sent by Xiao Jiang, inviting us to enter the world of meditation-like “rest”, through mutual selection, mutual acceptance and mutual investment, to establish a certain unique relationship with his paintings.
In the first part of the exhibition, two small-scale paintings “Installation” are opposed to the “Large Room” which is more than 3 meters wide, transforming the exhibition space into the “porch” of Xiao Jiang’s spiritual world. The seemingly plain and meaningless “installation” seems to imply that a person’s world is revealed in the most ordinary, easiest, and weakest chaos of life. At the same time, the act of “installation” also Inject time into the space, as if the start button was pressed at a certain depth in personal history. Afterwards, we stood in front of a “big room” with clearly defined levels of pictures-which is also an inclusive border zone-silently preparing for the upcoming Proust journey.
A passage in the middle of “The Big Room” leads people to the depths of the room, creating a private and frank atmosphere with a dense and humid tone, as if it contains Xiao Jiang’s complete life, the upper left of the picture Outside the square window is a soothing and thick mountain. But after watching it for a long time, the lines of the mountain seemed to be swallowed up by those colors and turned into a symbolic thing—the dense and unspeakable physical sensations closely attached to life. This painting also extended two clues-room (life) and mountain (feeling).
These two clues are intertwined in another exhibition hall, forming a “blank” world. This is the “blank” deposited by the artist after the artist uses boring behavior (walking/living) to continuously strip away the “meaning” attached to the landscape (event) during the long time of climbing (life). The process of watching the works is the process of constantly entering and leaving “life” and “mountains”-from “Mountain Road” to “Winding Mountain Road” to “Continuous Mountain Road”, from “Big Room” to “Small Room”, before and after the exhibition hall The two works “Rest” on the wall cleverly fill the gap between “boring” and “meaning”-the state of “rest” is just between “meaningless action” and “meaning of action”. The reflection and digestion of mountain climbing/life-the two works facing each other in a space, also set the tone for the entire exhibition. There is no bright scenery here, nor can there be no exciting events, and some are just smooth stretches and breaths. Mountains are just mountains, and life is just life.
But this does not mean that Xiao Jiang has lost his curiosity about life. On the contrary, he has a powerful ability to digest curiosity, and can dissolve the spectacle of curiosity into an equivalent care. Those daily chores that are easily filtered out by curiosity regain their lives and gain the value of being stared at. All the feelings he experienced in the process of climbing/ life were transformed into lines, brushstrokes, color blocks, and images on the canvas, and they were woven in a seemingly inattentive but thoughtful way to form a calming mind. Base. So people go to “In the Valley” and enjoy “Good Times”.
