TAO XIAN: THE NIGHTINGALE IS SINGING

Each work of art is its own world, a world that seeks to recalibrate the receptivity, rhythm, euphoria and grief of elementary emotional life, or, perhaps, a world that is simply ordinarily beautiful. Art offers new or different possibilities for our understanding of perception, society, and psychology.

The Nightingale is Singing, Tao Xian’s first solo exhibition at Enclave Contemporary, consists mostly of paintings and copies of her creative sketches, and offers viewers a different way of looking at the all too familiar. Each artwork’s title is also an introspective account by the artist of her inner experience, which like a magic wand opens the door to a better understanding of her work and provokes in viewers a rational anticipation for its content, subject and style. There is a wisdom in the subject and style of art that conveys to us the complexity of global questions and mental life.

The title of this exhibition “The Nightingale is Singing” is based on Tao Xian’s latest work When the Nightingale is Singing. According to the Baidu Baike online encyclopaedia, “The nightingale’s plumage is not dazzling, but its birdsong is exceptional, its range vast.” In fable there are two main types of nightingale, the first a symbol of profound melancholy, the second an embodiment of longing for a good life and a free world. Tao Xian’s works are peaceful and otherworldly, both tender and elegant, emanating an aura of resolution and poise. Although her compositions contain dreamlike, symmetrical lines and jagged edges, as paintings they are both solemn and reverent. Symmetry is one of the best ways to create a sense of balance. Her paintings exude a peculiar passion in the dead of night, luring viewers into the realm of the unconscious.

As you enter the exhibition, something like the following poem might appear in your mind:

The Nightingale is Singing

Before the nightfall
Midnight drops
Jumping at your fingertips

Red cherry
Habitat
The hidden breeze
When the nightingale is singing
The world is blue-gray after the fairy tale

Your arrival
Voyage
Her vibration
A dream from the star

This poem is formed of the titles of all the works featured in this exhibition. Aside from describing the subject-matter of Tao Xian’s art, these titles also possess the cadence of poetry. They lie in the exhibition space and sing to one another. The artist has turned calm observation into a kind of dialogue. Flora at night, an apple against the horizon, hands floating in mid-air, and a solitary wing – these are the objects that the artist hopes to reach into the heart of.

The beauty of her works dwells in a slow-moving dynamism, a kind of “metaphysical landscape” and “lively fantasia”. They portray the plane of a parallel universe that the artist, in a meditative yet conscious state, has probed and then faithfully reproduced on the canvas. Some of her works recall plants doggedly persisting in a vast desert, flowering in the dust and sparkling with life against an arid backdrop; others, like Jumping at Your Fingertips, enter a constituted space to refract the shape of real objects through heterogeneous matter to lend what is pictured an extraordinary quality.

To a certain extent, the heterogeneity that contemporary artworks require is of a piece with the internet’s constant appropriation and reconfiguration of imagery. They are the “deluge of contemporary knowledge” that forms part of the circulatory system of visual faith, externally co-existent and internally connected.

The flora and feathers in Tao Xian’s art draw from the structure of real flora and feathers and subject it to a process of repeated selection, combination and synthesis, making use of imaging software to produce on the canvas an other-worldly quality, a contemplative yearning. Harking back to surrealism and the psychological ambiguity between dream and reality, her work also provides for contemporary art a “scarce resource” rooted in the uncanny – the heterogeneity of the visual, the vagueness of semantic meaning, the precision of form, and a contemporary aesthetic. Through her understanding, deconstruction and refashioning of the objective world, the artist quietly transforms the laws by which species present themselves. In her work, a flower is no longer a flower, a wing no longer a wing. They may very much resemble their real-world counterparts, but somewhere along the line they have departed from that version of the real.

According to Tao Xian, artistic creation is a means for her to probe the depths of the spirit and the edification it offers. The beauty of her art lies in its inner world and not the colours and brushstrokes on its surface. Artists, biologists, philosophers and writers alike must face the specific challenges of living in the contemporary era and ask the question that has become the most pressing of our age: how do we think in a manner that encompasses the system of life as a totality? If we accept that knowledge itself is an elaborate system emerging from various forms of dialogue, then perhaps we will be able to bring different perspectives together, whether they draw from ideas about social and political change, local systems of belief, or ancient spiritual traditions, to explore the infinitesimal differences in our surroundings and work together to alleviate our bodily predicament.


Zhang Yingying
Translated by Stephen Nashef