The artist's name is Xie Shan, and the exhibition organized by Tong Gallery for Xie Shan is called “Knight of the Wasteland”. The curator told me that Xie Shan is indeed not a trained professional artist, but rather a schizophrenic who has been suffering from schizophrenia for many years.

Born in 1968 in Chongqing's Dongxi township, Xie Shan had been a keen painter since childhood, and in 1995 he began to experience some mental conditions, mainly auditory hallucinations. In the same year he jumped from the third floor of his home in an unsuccessful attempt to escape the hallucinations. He was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital for a year, and at this time he found a way to maintain a sense of reality and normalcy through his return to painting.

In a short autobiography written by himself in 2013, he says: “I am 45 years old this year and I still paint every day at home, it is my ambition to be a painter, and no matter what happens, I am going to follow the path of painting”.

01 Afternoon in the woods

Bottom: Afternoon Woods, oil on canvas, 80 x 100cm, 2009

One of the first works by Xie Shan that caught my attention was Afternoon Woods (2009). In the exhibition at Tong Gallery, this work presented a very different look. The colors are not applied, but rather adhere to the surface of the canvas in a viscous, liquefied form, as well as in the form of dots. And unlike most oil paintings, which build up a hierarchy of colors by covering them with multiple layers of paint, in this work all the colors are laid out on the same flat surface, but the viewer does not feel that it is “flat”.

Because of the pointillist-like approach, this work is unimaginably time-consuming, and I see no evidence of the artist's haste or loss of patience in the details of the surface. Instead, in every localization, I can see the drips and dabs of color meticulously produced by the nuances of a certain local relationship between light and dark.

Pro Manet, oil on canvas, 60 x 73cm, 2001

Sometime after the exhibition I

I came across this painting from the artist's materials

This work shows the artist's mastery of form and color.

The artist is able to reasonably construct complex shapes with fewer brushstrokes.

The details of the main character's face and the still life on the table are all well represented.

TONG GALLERY+PROJECTS “Knights of the Wasteland” by Xie Shan Exhibition

02 Samurai by the River

The view of the woods and the image of the trees have a special significance for Xie Shan, probably because the texture of some of the trees creates a pattern similar to that of an eye.

Schizophrenia is not a psychological disorder with a high degree of uniformity of symptoms, but rather an umbrella term for a wide range of psychological disorders, often characterized by hallucinations, hallucinations, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and disturbances in the perception of the real world.

Some people with schizophrenia describe frightening images or hallucinations (such as walls full of eyes, or the polka dots on a passerby's polka-dot dress suddenly “rushing” into their eyes) that appear in their lives without warning and disrupt their perception of space, time, and reality.

Samurai by the River, oil on canvas, 100x150cm, 2023

Among Xie Shan's many works depicting woods, Samurai by the River (2023) presents more of an unsettling tension and a disintegration of a certain visual order - in contrast to Afternoon Woods (2009), in which the artist's textures of the trees were meticulously constructed and imitated on the canvas. In Samurai by the River (2023), all the images break away from the framework of realism and are presented in a graphic and cartoonish framework.

The two “samurai” figures are characterized by their four large, exaggerated eyes, the outlines of which blend perfectly with the “branches” in front of them, while the blue color of the eyes takes over the darker blue blocks at the bottom of the image and the lighter blue blocks at the top, thus maintaining the image in a color dimension. The blue color of the eyes takes over the dark blue block at the bottom and the light blue block at the top of the picture, thus maintaining the harmony of the picture at the color level.

The alphabet-like blocks at the top of the picture seem to be some kind of visual hallucinatory color blocks produced by the onset of schizophrenia, but in this work these images are more dreamy and playful, rather than more fearful and disturbing emotions associated with schizophrenia.

03 Flowers in the Interior

Flowers in the Interior, oil on canvas, 50x40cm, 2020

Another color-related series that Xie Shan undertook in 2020 was a body of work that presented a geometrified floral appearance with a paper-cut texture, of which the best example is Flowers in the Interior (2020).

In this work, the pigments used to construct the flowers are warm and dominated by full-bodied reds, while the colors that serve as the background are dominated by blocks of blue and green. In the image of the red flowers scattered throughout the picture, each petal is constructed as a block of color with a sharp edge. This sharp edging clearly does not derive from the physical characteristics of real flowers, but is a stylized treatment by the artist.

Xie Shan's “Knights of the Wasteland” TONG GALLERY+PROJECTS Exhibition Site

According to the curator, Xie Shan's visual function is not perfect, which may be related to the fact that he has been taking medication for schizophrenia for years. When he is working on a picture, he needs to squint his eyes tightly and watch the brush in his hand and the paint on the canvas from an extreme distance in order to complete his work.

I'm inclined to think that Xie Shan apparently saw full-scale flowers in his early years, but in recent years, as his eyesight has deteriorated, flowers have become more of a hard-edged, geometric block of color in his eyes. However, Xie Shan has also gained a strong intuition and control of the language of color in his many years of painting, so he depicts the images of things he sees in his deteriorated vision in a reasonable color scheme. Therefore, in Flowers in the Interior (2020), we can see the damage that mental illness has done to Xie Shan, and how the artist faces this damage and transforms it into artistic language through art.

04 Sunday

Sunny, oil on canvas, 30x40cm, 2019

We can see the work Sunny (2019) as another example of transforming the harm caused by mental illness into the language of art. For patients with schizophrenia who have been under medication for a long period of time, there is a greater risk of experiencing degradation and disruption of vision than the norm.

In this regard, patients react more strongly to light - the diffuse effect of a spot of light against a dimly lit background creates a more permanent stay in the patient's vision, as if it were a solid object. The experience is not as pleasant as it sounds; in fact, the reaction to light constitutes a large part of the schizophrenic delusion and causes the patient's perception of the real environment to deviate more from the norm.

TONG GALLERY+PROJECTS, Xie Shan's “Riders of the Wasteland” exhibition site

However, we do not see this kind of uneasiness and confusion caused by the proliferation of light spots in the work “Clear” (2019). What we perceive in the halo that occupies most of the picture is a soft gesture and a cozy atmosphere. We can also see that Xie Shan's hand-drawn, imperfectly curved lines produce a rationalized differentiation for each halo depiction, and are filled with patience and devotion in the specific brushstrokes.

05 Medieval Battlefields of Europe

Medieval Battlefields of Europe, oil on canvas, 100x120cm, 2020

Painted in 2020, Medieval Battlefields of Europe (2020) shows us that Xie Shan retains a sense of childishness and exquisite painting ability outside of his illness - behind the seemingly casual arrangement, the composition of the picture shows strong logic, and in the portrayal of concrete images, whether abstract geometrical objects or highly cartoonized objects, the painting is full of patience and piety. In the depiction of concrete images, whether abstract geometric objects or highly cartoonized complex images, Xie Shan has shown a posture that balances between technology and childlike innocence - the most interesting detail is probably the big round eyes of these “soldiers”.

Throughout the series, Xie Shan repeatedly reduces the image of a person to a pair of large eyes ...... This somewhat reminds us of his earlier depictions of forests, where he also emphasized the eye-like lines on the branches of poplar trees. In this work, the figure of the “soldier” is reduced to a pair of large eyes hidden between a “shield” and a “helmet”, and behind all these geometrical, hard blocks of color, the eyes reveal a kind of intermingling of colors. Behind all these geometrically hard colors, these eyes show a mixture of horror and innocence, naivety and seriousness, dullness and cuteness. I think these are the emotions that exist in Xie Shan's consciousness, the emotions that he experiences and faces every day as a patient and an artist.

TONG GALLERY+PROJECTS Exhibition Scene of Xie Shan's “Riders of the Wasteland

Throughout Xie Shan's paintings, it is not difficult to find that his concern for history and the European landscape runs throughout. I think this is the kind of state that most adolescent boys would show when a boy tries to understand a field of knowledge in a rational manner.

Mental illness is a slow erosion of the integrity of the patient's will, and what some patients manifest in their later years is often a more severe crippling of their personality. Here we see that outside of his illness, Xie Shan's mind and rationality are intact - in the “battlefield” against schizophrenia, Xie Shan is proud and tenacious - he has In the “battlefield” against schizophrenia, Xie Shan is proud and tenacious - he has found art and the best way to fight the disease.

And not only that, Xie Shan's artistic achievements are not only meaningful to him personally, but his works do stand up to the scrutiny of professionals and can be treated as real art. I think it was his mental illness that allowed him to focus on his talent for drawing, which he showed at an early age, and enjoy it. Xie Shan's approach to painting is a combination of the professionalism of an artist, the persistence and clumsiness of a painter, and the self-healing in art of a sufferer-the coexistence of these identities can be seen by examining a portion of one of his works. I believe this will be the consensus of any viewer who has the opportunity to examine Xie Shan's paintings in person.

Text: LIN Zi

Photo: TONG GALLERY+PROJECTS, Artist

Editor: Phoebe