Solo Exhibition inner flow Gallery, Beijing
Curator: Bao Dong
Duration: 2024.7.26-8.29
Venue: inner flow Gallery, East Road, 798 ArtZone, 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
inner flow Gallery will launch a solo exhibition titled “Monsters of protein”by artist Jiang Xiaoyu on July 26, 2024. Curated by Bao Dong, the exhibition will showcase 17 significant works created by Jiang in recent years in the main gallery. Concurrently, the gallery’s first-floor space will present the exhibition “Jiang Peng”，featuring a series of his early sketches and poems, connecting the past “Jiang Peng”with the present “Jiang Xiaoyu”.
Monsters of protein
written by Baodong
Consciously or unconsciously, Jiang Xiaoyu's paintings coexist with two completely opposite images. One is the image of a strong, bulky, inflated male figure, often depicted with boxing gloves, flaunting rounded deltoid shoulders, lifting barbells, and holding a pipe or cigar. However, no matter how you look at him, this image is always filled with superficiality and belatedness, weak and flabby within the whole body, even somewhat cowardly in character.
Through the round shapes filling the male body figure, Jiang Xiaoyu discovers and develops a more fundamental, lower-level, or elemental figure. These figures are like resemble blobs of flesh; organs; bacteria; single cells; primitive protein organisms; and ambiguous, primal infant-like beings. It is the combination of these two images that creates adorable monsters in his paintings, potentially a metaphor for the male psyche?
In the current social context, the male subjects in these paintings emit a strong sense of "loser" vibes, especially in the consciousness of gender relations—an impotent display, a clownish male competition. These psychological structures hidden behind Jiang Xiaoyu's works endow his paintings with a comedic aesthetic, a "clown" self-mockery, and madness.
Thus, those "superficial" fluorescent colors are deliberately laid out in the "deep" expressionist strokes, depicting a "vulgar" sincerity. The scraping after thick application seen everywhere also reflects a certain real "slickness," a sense of emptiness after a burst of passion. In terms of style, Jiang Xiaoyu's themes and language achieve unity through mutual wriggling.
Besides painting, Jiang Xiaoyu is also a poet, expressing between their legs and the first half of life, desire and reality, expression and reflection in words. These colloquial, sparsely meaningful expressions maintain a similar texture to his paintings. It is undeniable that Jiang Xiaoyu, standing in the role of a male, exposes their ambition and sordidness, various self-righteous sexual tensions, and counterproductive sexual frustrations. Perhaps, it is precisely by facing that sense of failure honestly that his works achieve a kind of honesty in temperament and solidity in painting, albeit with lingering regret.
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