On Aug. 27 QI MU SPACE will present Xinjiku&XIANG Ziqi, a solo exhibition by the young artist Xiang Ziqi. The exhibition comprises oil painting, printmaking, paper-based mixed material, and free animation. The title, inspired by Borges, is based on the artist’s two names, each symbolic of a representative period in her career, bearing witness to a long dialogue the artist held with her self over the years. The memory of hergrowth, conscientious effort in the search of art media as a student, as well as her experience in film, poetry, and novels, work together to build a rich world of emotion and sentimentality. There is always keen perception of color and line running through her art , whether it is an unbridled paper-based mixed material work or a restrained oil painting.
By introducing into the exhibition Xinjiku, her nickname in the virtual world, and Xiang Ziqi, her real name, the artist turns the event into a dual solo that, besides defining her identity, in other words “who”, aims to reveal a kind of “veiled reality”. The sustained questioning of “who am I” and “how to examine” in her art leads to the exploration of “Xinjiku” and “Xiang Ziqi” as both “reality” and “uncertainty”. In the uninterrupted growth, “he, she and they” followed different routes, but the differences between them are accompanied by uninterrupted connection and existence, so it seems possible to understand “who am I” by referring to the concrete and real past and present, but “the real” seems to be impossible to be verified or fixed, and therefore the past becomes “imagination”. The motif that underlies “El otro, el mismo” is actually “how can we rediscover ourselves”, i.e., pursuing the meaning of a perfect being in the process of fission.
Art creation offers the young artist a way to confront with his desire. In two years time, on one hand she recreated the memory and the imagination of her family and childhood in freeze animation, on the other she forecast a future born of the subconscious world by identifying in the painting the traces of perception of content and material and by exploring the thin paint, fluid strokes and the relation in balance.
