XIE QI
Biography
Xie Qi was born in Chongqing, China in 1974. She graduated from Beijing’s Central Academy of Art and Design in 1998. The artist describes the difficulty of supporting herself in the city but suggests that ‘comfortable is not good for art. Beijing relates directly to my work, and here I have to keep things simple.’
Xie Qi Artworks
Xie Qi materialises the elusive relationships between the body, objects, and the landscapes they inhabit through richly layered and diffuse brushwork.
Xie’s process involves careful layering of paint with long periods of drying and contemplation between; paintings can take years to complete. She makes note that her figures are not magnified, narcissistic representations but seemingly randomly selected, ephemeral, and non-descript in their specificity. ‘Appearance and shape, observed from different angles, are truly the main points’, she explains. ‘But of course there is always something behind it.’
Solo exhibitions include Disorder of Yeast, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland (2021); The Summer Heat Has Been Gone for Years, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Beijing, China (2021); Clavicle, BANK Gallery, Shanghai, China (2019); The Unbearable Weight of Things, Pekin Fine Arts, Hong Kong, China (2016); and Displacement, Dawan Art, Paris, France (2016).
Group exhibitions include Silent Theater Dual exhibition, HdM Gallery, Beijing, China (2021); DISFRUTA, BANK x Objective, Shanghai, China (2021); Clean, SPURS Gallery, Beijing, China (2020); Casting Votes, CLC Gallery, Beijing, China (2021); Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany (2019); and Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life, Institute for Provocation (IFP), Beijing, China (2019).
Xie Qi currently lives and works in Beijing, China.
Xie Qi, So Green (Mao on Fifty Yuan), 2012. Oil on canvas — 200 × 180 cm
(Courtesy of co-founder & collector Maxime Bureau)