Have you ever seen yourself aside when falling asleep or in deep thought, when everything around you moves away, goes by the wayside, and then completely dissolves in a foggy haze? I assure you that during such moments we all look special. Everything that is put on and momentary disappears, giving way to innermost, the range of feelings that hides inside us. Real experience comes to surface and becomes visible. Try, looking at the person at such moment, to let your imagination flow. If you are careful and sensitive enough, you will be able to look into a mysterious world where you are both connected by the thinnest threads and where you understand each other without words.
Australian artist Ah Xian of Chinese origin does that. He is a catcher of elusive and a mouthpiece of speechless. He looks, listens and feels what is happening between him and the model and extracts images from the space pulsating with dreams and fantasies, capturing them in unusual portraits.
The artist makes all porcelain forms for further painting from real models, for which this process is a fantastic journey into the inner space associated with deep experiences. Think yourself, the model is carefully wrapped in cloth impregnated with paste and left so for a few hours. The only thing that connects a person with the outside world is breathing, which is carried out through straws inserted into nostrils. Model`s face is completely sealed in an impenetrable cocoon, which hardens every hour. I am sure that participating in such a process, models experience very strong feelings and vivid images.
Plaster reflects the smallest folds of skin, concavity and convexity of a skull, muscles pattern, marks and scars and seals them in the mold, recreating a precise shape of head. This form reflects not only the experience gained by a person during his/her life, but also what was lived by the model during the session. Then Ah Xian starts painting, splashing out their impressions of what is happening during the session on the snow-white porcelain surface. The bust cast in porcelain becomes an incarnate presence, a joint creative act of the model and the artist, a meeting place of time and eternity. Age, personal experience, memories are inexplicably intertwined with fantasies and images that have no beginning, no end, no affiliation.
These were my fantasies, only Ah Xian himself and his models know how things really are :)
Ah Xian was born in Beijing in 1960. He dreamed of becoming an artist since childhood, but his fate was different. After graduating from college, he became a mechanic, and he could create only in his spare time. In 1983, China witnessed another company to combat "spiritual pollution" and the artist was arrested, condemning his painting as alien to the ideals of the official Academy of Arts. He was only in prison for a couple of days, but the event shocked him. He began to paint surreal paintings – naked women and men among the pile of architectural designs. He was strangled by total lack of freedom, in which he did not see an opportunity to make his dreams come true.
Ah Xian first came to Australia in 1989, he was invited to conduct workshops at the School of Arts. His return to homeland coincided with the massacre of the student demonstration, which finally convinced the artist that freedom of creativity was impossible in China. He decided to seek political asylum in Australia and did so when he had an opportunity. Working as a cook and painter, Ah Xian continued to paint and even was exhibited in galleries in Sydney, but the themes of his work were dark, imbued with memories of tragic events of the past. Plaster casts of hands and feet, "packed" in ammunition boxes, nailed to the wall, oozing with "blood" of the dead and wounded – the artist presented such an installation in 1993 in the Sydney Museum of Modern Art.
Ah Xian liked to work with plaster, but this material lacked expressiveness, and the artist decided to turn to porcelain. It was his salvation. Firstly, this hobby made him return to China for a while. He went to study in the small town of Jingdezhen – the birthplace of the famous imperial porcelain. Apparently this made him accept the past, that gave food to his creative imagination. Secondly, porcelain was so clean and expressive material that the artist did not want to distort and misrepresent it. As a result, a series of busts "China, China" was born - real men and women, painted with traditional Chinese patterns of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The drawings resemble tattoos, symbolizing generic marks left by the centuries-old heritage of Chinese civilization. Porcelain healed wounded soul of the artist and helped Ah Xian calm down about his past, so he has an opportunity to enjoy the beauty and harmony of the world.