黑料不打烊

If I were to describe Xie Nanxing (b. 1970, Chongqing), I would call him a rabid perfectionist, probably the perfectionist par excellence in the art of setting enthralling visual traps aimed to deliberately bewitch and faze the viewer. With the commitment and manic precision of a spider, Xie Nanxing spends over two months spinning each of his pictorial webs, eventually creating an incredibly variegated and almost hallucinatory texture of colour and light with the power to ensnare passing observers' eyes and trigger their unconscious desires and fears. In reference to the series of three 220x385 cm oil paintings created in 2008, Xie Nanxing makes one of his distinctive, seemingly innocuous assertions: "When, under casual circumstances, somebody misstates a word and happens to utter unpredictable and bizarre formulations - for example, I want to say 'glass', I have a glass clear in my mind, but I end up saying 'bread' instead - such 'mistakes' always involve a primary desire, the insatiable desire for expression". Far beyond a mere allusion to the theory of the Freudian slip (lapsus linguae, or 'slip of the tongue'), Xie Nanxing's pronouncement conceals his real interest: to orchestrate, by means of transposing the concept of the 'slip of the tongue' on canvas, an alluring yet unfair game that the artist plays not only with the observer, but also with himself. One of Xie Nanxing's targets - or so it seems - is to destabilize and surprise the viewer (himself included) by the calculated insertion of what could be regarded as 'slips of the eye', booby-traps that the artist sets in advance with strategic accuracy. With these 'mistakes', Xie Nanxing stalks new possibilities for his artistic experimentation and, at the same time, serves up unfocussed visual mysteries that relentlessly tease spectators' acknowledged logical perception of the image. Xie Nanxing consistently and purposely constructs technical barriers in order to create a distance between his original