An Excerpt from”In a Single Shell, Life’s Eternal Spiral Unfurls”
By Leiming，ART CHESTNUT，20/11/2024
Over the past two years, artist Xin Di has consistently used “conch shells” as her creative theme. These works brim with architectural form and provide space and rationale for expressing the inherent qualities of oil painting and brushstrokes. Life, time-space, self-construction, and ontological awareness are key words in her creations. Through these, the artist renders the familiar strange, allowing viewers to perceive the richness and diversity of living beings from new perspectives.
Seeking Vessels for Life
In her solo exhibition “Natural Selection,” paintings of large and small shells fill all four floors of the Boyan Art Space, inviting viewers to experience the allure of magnified details up close.
Architect is the newest work in this solo show, depicting a wentletrap shell. Wentletraps attach stones, shells, and coral to their bodies, forming peculiar spiral adhesions for camouflage. To the artist, the wentletrap is like an architect in the sea—this construction derived from biological traits exemplifies nature’s wonders.
The depicted wentletrap, transformed through artistic language, is composed of richly layered purples and golds, with the use of purple particularly astonishing. Variations in purity, grayscale, brightness, and warm-cool tones span the entire purple spectrum. The numerous parasitic shell fragments attached to its surface engage in dialogue with purples and yellows across hues, forming a torrent of color akin to “theme and variations” in music.
Shells are the growth rings left by living beings, silent records of ceaseless life expansion, inscribing life’s encounters onto their surfaces. Xin Di captures life’s beauty and abundance with keen observation and delicate colorwork.
Xin Di tells Art Chestnut: “Fragmented expressions of things offer perspectives easily overlooked in daily life; it is between the familiar and the strange that memories and emotions find their ideal domain.” This overlooked intimacy creates alienation from the world, where only close scrutiny reveals differences among all things, granting individuals due respect. She crafts such a viewing perspective in her paintings to help people rediscover the value of the individual.
Between abstraction and figuration emerges a profound dizziness and trance, directing these textures toward the multiplicity of existence: both outward growth and inward contemplation; both material vessels and spiritual dwellings.
Collecting Genuine Emotions from Daily Trivialities
Xin Di captures details and colors imperceptible in everyday viewing. Thumb-sized or palm-sized shells, when magnified, reveal astonishing beauty and rhythm; aesthetically, their “presence” becomes perceptible. Xin Di says she doesn’t preconceive the finished work but adjusts intuitively during painting.
Thus, an “object” is holographic—detached from its environment yet retaining scents, textures, and emotions of the whole scene. In Xin Di’s works, a partial object is the same: though unrecognizable as such, through texture, pattern, folds, and wear, one can trace back to the past, even emotional stories. Under her brush, things exist in this state: abstracted to near-unrecognizability on one hand, yet concretely infused with the subtlest emotional ripples on the other.
She discovered her interest in expressing emotions and ideas through depicting objects. “Compared to people, objects are far simpler. Language, behavior, images are deceptive; objects honestly retain human life traces, making multifaceted personalities easier to glimpse through them,” Xin Di tells Art Chestnut.
During undergrad finals, she created a series from a female perspective: body parts and closely related objects. Mirror Sense is one, where a woman’s body is tightly wrapped in pearlescent thick fabric, its special texture reflecting the environment, conveying overt female themes: the inner female self vanishing in the external world.
Power, created in 2018, features a white fabric mass centrally against black, with translucent folds layered mysteriously, faded yet enigmatic. The upper half of this jumpsuit is omitted, leaving only the massive skirt. Xin Di renders every fold change with expressive strokes. The skirt’s surface flares outward, its center cascading like a waterfall—a vehement outpouring of language and emotion.
Objects prove our existence: what we choose, how we use them, what they endure—all etched on their surfaces. Beyond these traces, little else proves “we once existed.” When Xin Di meticulously depicts object parts, it’s not infatuation with things but a microscopic scrutiny of “existence,” recording every visible and potential emotional undulation through brushstrokes.
撰文：雷鸣；艺术栗子报道；2014年11月20日
近两年来，艺术家歆迪一直以“螺”作为创作主题，这些作品充满建筑的形式感，也为油画、笔触本身特性的表达提供空间和理由。生命、时空、自我构建、本体觉知，这些都是她创作中的关键词。透过这些，艺术家让熟悉的事物变得陌生，从而让观众在新的视角中感知生命体的丰富性和多样性。
寻找承载生命的容器
在个展“自然选择”中，大大小小的螺壳绘画挂满伯年艺术空间的四层展厅，令观众近距离感受到作品中被放大的细节的魅力。
《建筑师》是此次个展中的最新作品，描绘的是一只缀壳螺。缀壳螺会将石块、贝壳和珊瑚等黏在自己身上，形成奇特的螺旋状黏合，起到伪装的作用。在艺术家看来，缀壳螺就像大海中的建筑师，这种来自生物特性的建造，正是大自然的奇妙之处。
画中这只经过艺术语言转化的缀壳螺，由层次丰富的紫色和金色组成，其中对紫色的使用尤为令人惊叹。不同纯度、灰度、明度、冷暖的变化，几乎横跨了紫色的整个色盘。附着在螺身表面的大量寄生贝壳碎片，在不同的色相中与紫色、黄色保持着对话，形成一道色彩的激流，宛如音乐中的“主题与变奏”。
螺壳是生命体留下的年轮，是生命不断生长的无声记录，将生命的遭遇铭刻在表面。歆迪运用敏锐的观察和细腻的色彩，记录下生命的美好与丰盛。
歆迪对《艺术栗子》说：“事物片段化的表达，是平时最容易被人们忽略的视角，在熟悉和陌生之间，才是回忆和情感最适合表达的场域。”这种被忽视的亲密感，令人与世界的关系变得疏离，只有在近距离的审视之下，万物之间的差异才能体现出来，个体才能得到应有的尊重。她在画中创造出这样一种观看视角，就是为了让人们重新意识到个体的价值。
在这种抽象性与具象性之间，产生了一种强烈的眩晕感和恍惚感，令这些螺纹指向了存在的多重性：既是向外扩张的生长，也是向内收敛的沉思；既是物质性的容器，也是精神性的栖居所。
日常琐碎中搜集真实情感
歆迪将平时难以看清的细节和色彩捕捉下来。拇指或至多巴掌大小的螺壳，经过放大之后，具有令人惊叹的美感和节律，在美学的意义上，其“存在感”才能为人所感知。歆迪说，她不会预先想好作品完成的样子，而是在绘画的过程中跟随感觉不断调整。
因此，一个“物”是“全息”的，虽然从环境中离开，却保留着关于整个场景的气味、触感和情绪。在歆迪的作品中，一个物体的局部也是如此，尽管物体已难以辨识，但通过纹理、图案、褶皱和磨损，却能够一直追寻到过往，甚至情感的故事。在她笔下，事物处于这样一种状态：一方面，抽象到几乎无法辨认的地步；另一方面，具体到充满了哪怕最细微的情感波澜。
她发现自己对通过描绘物来表达情感和想法的创作方式更感兴趣。“人跟物件相比，其实要复杂得多。语言、行为、图像都具有欺骗性，反而在物的身上，诚实地保留了很多人的生活痕迹，通过外物更容易窥见人的多面性。”歆迪告诉《艺术栗子》。
在本科毕业阶段，她以女性视角创作了一系列小幅作品，描绘了身体的局部，以及和身体密切相关的物件。《镜面感》就是其中之一，女性身体被一件珍珠色的厚实服装紧紧包裹着，特殊质感的面料反射着环境，作品传达了显而易见的女性主题：女性的内在自我在外部世界中消失。
《权力》创作于2018年，在黑色的背景中，中央赫然出现一团白色的织物，半透明的布褶层层堆叠，一股褪色的、神秘的气息扑面而来。这条连体裙的上半部分被有意去掉了，只留下巨大的裙摆。歆迪用充满表现力的笔触描绘了每一道褶皱的变化。裙子的表层向两侧掀开，中间的部分瀑布般倾注下来，如同语言和情感的强烈宣泄。
物品是我们存在于世的证明，我们选择了什么，如何使用，遭遇了什么，都深深地铭刻在物体表面。除了留下这些痕迹，恐怕再也没有什么能够证明“我们曾经存在过”。当歆迪细致地描绘物体局部时，那绝不是在表达对物的迷恋，而是怀着一种对“存在”入微的审视，用笔触记录下每一个可见的和可能的情感起伏。
Link:https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/4fe74-y6Ft0NK2V7zmvOAg