After graduated from Room 3 of the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Xia Yu spent six years on accumulation and waiting for the “point” that he becomes a professional painter, and those years experience of life has become into his resource of memories and changes. Now the artist who concentrates on “language” is celebrating his second solo Exhibition, meanwhile, he still keeps the qualities that he always had: “being pure” and “being shy”. “An artist is too far to touch, I hope that I am a painter”, Xia Yu said.
Strangeness is valuable
More than 500 days ago, Xia Yu’s first solo exhibition opened in the Line Gallery, wherein the works nourished by compact dimensions, delicate strokes and faintly discernible colors have an indescribable quality. In the pictures, the familiar warm enveloped the figures and scenes, as well as the unconcern created by the artist’s calm and self-restraint, is drifting away from a fuzzy boundary; it’s like that audience in front of the pictures has the feelings of warm and unconcern at the same time, or, they lost the feelings of being touched and being casual at the same time. That is a strange experience, like that the communication between the audience and the works is blocked and twisted by some miracle power, then became indirect, unsmooth, but unforgettable.
Xia Yu said that sometimes “being strange” is valuable, if you do not use the “strangeness” to serve yourself. He found his “strangeness” through the two exhibitions of himself: one is the strange mind that is different from the masses; the other is the totally strange language. These “strangeness” not only make Xia Yu’s works not easy to match others in group exhibitions, but also distinguished them with personal marks. Xia Yu never worried about his “strangeness”, he just recalls the feelings of his pictures and the impressions of the environments.
That is certainly related to the personality of the artist. Xia Yu as a Leo does not seem aggressive at all. He takes painting as a sort of self-liberty, he made more than one thousand practices for the study of “language”, every step of the Xia’s tempera is based on the traditional tempera but improved by trial and error, which makes the final pictures have something of the Chinese ink and wash paintings, representing some aspiration and interest of traditional literati.
Xia Yu insists on technical trains and always seeks for technical breakthroughs. He created his own universe using the unique language, although compared with most other paintings it is somehow “strange” because of being rarely seen, but who can deny that the “strange is also “valuable”?
Drawing pure paintings, being a pure painter
Every painter somehow has his/her own understanding regarding the “substance of painting”. For Xia Yu, the substance of painting is drawing. “The artistic concept that I always insist on is that every form of art has its own substantial characteristics, and the closer to the substance, the purer the characteristics are. For example, the substance of photograph is recording, the substance of movie is telling, and the substantial characteristic of painting is drawing”. Taking drawing as the substantial characteristic of painting, Xia Yu keeps the mind of “drawing pure paintings, being a pure painter”. However, apparently, “being pure” is never simple. As for painting, “being pure” requires not only a safe and unique language, but also a firm will in the changing world.
With the desire of “being pure”, Xia Yu is making exploration and insistence to meet the two requirements. He seeks for the breakthrough on language and tries to “talk the old stories with new language”. Meanwhile, he is loyal to himself. For a short time after his first solo exhibition, Xia Yu have had felt vacant and entangled, but quickly he went back to his paintings and recorded the struggles in calm, putting the fierce fights behind the pictorial peace.
In Xia Yu’s eyes, telling a new story in an existing language is substantially different from telling a broadly known story with an innovative language. The former cannot escape from the criticism on cliché, but the later could make an ordinary story soul-touching. Therefore Xia Yu spent great patience on digging, in order to find his own language, create his own universe and make breakthroughs on painting technique. Although Xia Yu said that he is not good at telling story, in fact, ordinary stories often became extraordinary because of the classical air in his paintings.
When not painting, Xia Yu, like other artists and us, is living in the same society and era as us, where enticement and inevitable competition exists at the same time and were suddenly amplified after his first solo exhibition. The sudden attention is a double-edged sword, it helped Xia Yu to break out of the old close world, and on the other hand, it shows him the various complex tastes of people. After the exhibition, he has once struggled between the two angles of himself and the audience, and inevitably felt the great pressure of the big environment and his artistic career. For Xia Yu, who was concentrated on painting, the struggle is something difficult to deal with, making him feel “all aboard”. It was the insistence on purity that helped Xia Yu to find himself and the sound strategy for moving on. He said that other painters will understand the struggles in his works, and they should also understand his insistence and dreams: consistent purity. That is also what he hope us to feel in front of his works.
Born to be it
For Xia Yu, insistence is not a problem. Being more than thirty years old, Xia Yu might change his opinions about the world very now and then, but he will not change his values. “A painter must insist on painting, otherwise he is over.” In fact, after graduated from CAFA, Xia Yu experienced too much to get a direct and intensive comprehension of the current era, which helped him to keep the interest and confidence on painting, as well as the awareness of crisis.
Xia Yu thinks he’s “not smart enough”, so painting for him is like waking up naturally, when the time was up, he had no choice but to be a painter. Within moments, Xia Yu is celebrating his second solo exhibition, wherein his confidence and control of color and large dimensioned-piece has been obviously strengthened compared with the previous works. In Xia Yu’s eyes, these works are not that “ancient”, neither as “bitter” as before. What looked significantly different is the hand series. “Hands”, for Xia Yu, are the most expressive parts of human body, so it is extremely difficult to express “hands”. Xia Yu thinks that drawing hands is a challenge because they have feelings; however, he draws two hands in the new works instead of only one in the old works, thus the pictures are richer and accordingly the actions to be expressed are more complex. What’s more, the small paintings of still lifes are also more complex; the rich emotions and symbolic meaning, as well as the not inconsiderable warm in the pictures had presented the admiration to the aesthetic significance of painting.
Maybe just in the process of seeking for challenge and conquest, Xia Yu realized his dream of being pure and becoming a painter; he said he was born to be it, a pure painter.
