Xu Ruotao
Li Space, Beijing, China
Xu Ruotao, Yo/ Earth (2006)
The title of Xu Ruotao’s exhibition, ‘Hostile’, signals adversity, antagonism and aggression, whilst appealing to our darker curiosities. Who or what is hostile? What is the nature of the hostility? And at what is it directed? The show’s substantial wall text introduces Xu’s practice in the context of the discord inherent in cultural production and alongside his personal experiences of upheaval, probing, retreat and progress. Early on in his career, following a move from Shenyang to the Yuanmingyuan artist village in 1991, Xu painted beds as vehicles to express his feelings of detachment and animosity towards the world surrounding him; now, ‘hostility’ is asserted as both an attitude and the method for his work – a force of inspiration and refinement.
History (2007)
The exhibition begins with Rumination (2009), a 104-minute film with a complex narrative involving nominal characters: a teacher, a couple, a vagrant and a group of Red Guards seen through the eyes of a young boy. Whilst the boy matures naturally, their time (in the period 1966–76) travels in reverse: the Red Guards come across an abandoned factory – their ideals are already decaying and the Revolution has apparently passed without them. It is a sophisticated work, but positioned as it is, facing out towards the gallery entrance and with no available seating, its impact is diminished.
Once inside the gallery, viewers are met with a room filled with paintings charting Xu’s jagged abstraction. Collectively they articulate an unyielding, splintered view. Some, such as Yo. Earth (2006), clearly reveal the way Xu gleans pictures from the Internet (in this case an image of an astronaut), transfers them to Photoshop and proceeds to ‘draw’ over them before scanning the combined image onto canvas and painting meticulously over it. These ‘digital paintings’, along with works from 2008–09 that resort to a flat mass of scrawled lines, are variously ‘hostile’.
Black Series No. 12 (2008)
The densest canvases, like Black Series No. 12 (2008), for example, snarl at the eye through an obfuscating mass of erratic lines; those that retain an image at once assault and affix it in a creative exercise that lies between representation and interference. In the exhibition text, this dichotomy serves as an interpretation of Xu’s attitude as both ‘anti’ his surroundings and ‘pro’ individualistic creation. The physical movements of the computer mouse resonate with a child’s first basic acts of art: colouring books with a picture outline at first partially and carefully filled in, then scribbled over quickly through lack of patience or sporadic aggression with a coloured pencil or felt tip pen.
The paintings convey hostility in an aural sense, too, in that they are reminiscent of sonic fuzz on a TV set or visualizations of static electric crackling, both of which can connote political broadcasts and broken projections of ideology across the airwaves. This dark angle is reflected in the cold, grey sequences of the computer animation Beijing Changping Qiliqun Asylum (2008), which visualizes the ‘Temporary Shelter’, a detention centre which forms part of Xu’s experience with the law – and its hostility toward artists during the final year of the Yuanmingyuan commune’s existence, around 1995, when artists were regularly arrested and sent home; a few of those who resisted were sent to the ‘Temporary Shelter’.
The impact of Xu’s work is unexpected in terms of how its message transcends its medium. Although a description of his method may sound somewhat pedestrian as a series of transferences of images that are painted over in the final stage, it makes an interesting case for an artist’s negative feelings towards the surrounding world and its imagery as conducive to a sustained aesthetic. Complex and rocky though the path to this creative realization has been for the artist, the marks he makes with a modern technological tool seem to return to a primal artistic action; at the same time, over-painting those spontaneous strokes aptly represents, perhaps, the cyclical inertia of the contemporary moment, in which we are dogged by a surfeit of pictures.
Iona Whittaker
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