Mud, Paper, Leaf, Emptiness
Dr. Rich Goodson
Stump, 2020
soil, thatch
46×40×56cm
Chongqing, China
Xiguan Lei is an artist whose time has come.
Although his work might be recognizable as ‘conceptual art’, ‘land art’, ‘eco-art’, ‘bio-art’, ‘time-based art’, or ‘performance art’ – and therefore placeable in the avant-garde currents of the last sixty years, these labels don’t do justice to the depth and ambition of what he has set out to do.
His work in both 2D and 3D stands outside of artistic fashions and beyond our restrictive attempts at interpretation. Crucially, he is an artist whose time has come precisely because he is outside of time. Or we can say, perhaps, that his work operates outside of conventional, linear, ‘modern’ time.
野有死麕 野有死麕 , 2018
There is a Dead River Deer in the Wild
soil, weathered stone powder, thatch
152×64×36cm
The Voice of a Tree, 2023
Marker pen on Nepalese paper
18.5×19cmm
You're 'It'! You're Awake! You're Alive! Now Jump 16 Times Because:
1. everything's
2.what
3. it
4. seems
5. a
6.deer's
7. smelt
8. wet
9. night
10. leapt
11. behind
12. you
13. peed
14. in
15. your
16. dreams
XGL. 2023, Translator: Rich Goodson
1476 Sounds from Fallen Leaves and Soil, 2024
soil, weathered rock powder, thatch
132×32×10cm
Instead, his art, which is always gentle – even to the point of being hard to discern, built as it often is from organic matter and placed amongst leaves, moss, stones, and bark – is also, in fact, making a very bold and visionary proposal.
His proposal is this: that Self and Nature need not be separate entities. He is not expressing or documenting or representing either Self or Nature. Instead, he is exploring ways that Self and Nature relate and interpenetrate. He is actively demonstrating that one is part of the other. Thus, his interventions into Nature are a ‘working with’ Nature’s materials and a ‘working with’ Nature’s seasons and Nature’s cycles of time. If we see his naked body becoming part of the work, it is not to promote the ego of the artist, or to titillate – it is to make the far bolder assertion that we, as human beings, are part of Nature’s constant motion and materiality.
1476 Sounds from Fallen Leaves and Soil No.2, 2024
The soil is part of us. We are part of the soil. The bamboo forest is part of us. We are part of the bamboo forest. We are as vulnerable as Nature, as porous, as interdependent, as constantly changing, as borderless.
In this he is a deeply Chinese and a deeply spiritual artist, harking back to China’s distinct spiritual traditions of Taoism and Chan Buddhism (traditions which say very clearly that ‘spirituality’ is not separate from Nature or ordinary human experience). Those traditions are manifesting – blooming – in fresh ways in his work. His work celebrates and plays with the ephemeral, and so is “a finger pointing to the moon”: it is a gesture beyond Self, beyond Time, beyond Meaning, beyond Knowing.
Xiguan Lei is a poet of the soil, and of timelessness.