Local artist Xiaowen Chen came to the United States from Dalian, China when he was around thirty years old. He started creating art when he was in middle school, mainly focusing on wood carvings. When he was in college, he shifted to printmaking instead. However, printmaking was difficult to pursue in China because, as he explained, “they only had calligraphy paper, and not good paper for printmaking.” He also wanted to explore lithography and etching, which required materials that were difficult to acquire in China. At the time, the US and European countries were regarded as the centers of modern art, which furthered his desire to pursue an education overseas. “State universities [in the US] had scholarships, so [he] came to America,” he says, and he eventually ended up at Illinois State University with a full ride.
In the US, his original fascination with American art gradually shifted to criticism. At first, he described himself as “blindly following American art,” and the Western idea of modernity. Like many other artists and people in other countries, he respected and looked up to the US and its ideas. Even in China, many artists during the 1980s and 90s were copying Western styles. But for them, their adoption of Western styles was largely due to financial reasons. Fueled by Cold War ideologies and racism, Western buyers and collectors particularly liked Chinese artists who created work that were either anti-Communist or perpetuated Orientalism or exoticism. For these reasons, Chinese artists often copied Western styles in order to please their audience. “In a sense, it was cultural colonialism,” Chen says, the way Western culture was imposed on Chinese artists who were looking to make a living through their art.
As he started to experience and interact with more art movements ideas in the U.S, he also became more critical of the movements. He was particularly uninterested in postmodernism, because he believed that it had become “too theoretical … too influenced by philosophers and artists … based on language and concepts … [and] less about human experience.” In a way, artistic environments had become a “playground for artists and theorists,” and strayed too far from the general population. Instead, Chen seeks to create art works that are humble and showcase his personal voice, and wants his audience to be able to understand his work.
Xu Bing, Chen’s friend and another Chinese artist, also publicly expressed criticisms of American modern art, especially because he believed it was “just for the sake of art, [and didn’t] care about its audience.” Witnessing the negative parts of US art and ideas towards Chinese culture and art, his fascination with it gradually dissolved and allowed him to “form his own voice” and explore different ideas.
Originally a visual artist, Chen eventually realized the limitations of 2D and started exploring different media, particularly attracted by plays and videos. When he started working at Alfred University in 1996, the rise of computers and video editing software and encouragement from his friend, Jessie Shefrin, influenced him to pursue creating experimental videos. As he started working more with computers, he also learned programming, which gave him “more freedom to change pictures” in the way that he liked. His exploration into the field of technology, with a concentration on videos, computer science, and robotics, led him to create a technology and art program at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing with courses including AI and Art and BioArt. Beyond technology, Chen is also interested in philosophy and poetry. Some of the poets and philosophers with the greatest impact on him include TS Eliot, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and Bruno Latour.
Chen’s experiences in both China and the US has given him introspection on the different types of art in the two countries. He has a strong belief that art reflects culture, which he proved through the example of perspectives. In the US, artists are often taught to draw landscapes using a one-point perspective, where objects further away seem smaller and disappear into a point. Technically speaking, this is how things are seen by humans. In China, however, the drawings Chen saw growing up were from the opposite perspective, where the viewer was at the end of the point. He attributed this to the different values that US and Chinese artists had: American artists are “looking for something new, something more truthful … they try to find the essence of reality.” On the other hand, Chinese artists “didn’t have [a] concept of what’s real. Chinese art is not about what’s real. Nothing’s real. You compare Chinese art with how you feel about reality.” While American artists learned figure sketching through learning anatomy, Chinese artists were taught to project their mental image of a figure onto the paper from their memories. American art was supposed to be scientifically true and representational of reality, whereas Chinese art was about experience and personal perspectives. “Look, from your memory, feel, and put [it] onto [the] paper,” he describes as the Chinese drawing process.
His particular painting process was also quite interesting, and influenced by Chinese ideas and values. For many Chinese artists, “the most important criteria for art is energy.” When Chen paints, he “imagines his internal energy flowing through his arm, through his brush, and onto the paper.” That’s why, he admitted with a smile, he will often paint simple lines and images very slowly. This energy was something he believed that Westerners couldn’t feel.
When he looked at action painting, he believed that it looked like the artists were “dancing on the surface. [They weren’t] really standing on the ground, pushing your body into the ground.” To him, painting was like calligraphy and martial arts. “Like taekwondo. Push, not punch. That kind of energy.” His artworks also incorporate Chinese ideas. He describes his mark making in particular as influenced by Chinese calligraphy, with an emphasis on both description and transcendence. When he draws a tree, for example, he uses his lines to make it look descriptive enough for the audience, but also wants to transfer the idea of a tree, it’s life and movement. Specifically, he pays attention to movement and weight in his mark making, because to him, “life needs movement and weight.”
The ideas in his artworks have gone under significant shifts. The first phase he describes as focused on transformations, which he compares to the water cycle. The water cycle, a system in nature, involves several processes where water changes states of matter. Liquid water evaporates, becoming water vapor, which then condenses into clouds, and then precipitates back into the earth as rain, snow, or other forms. In the human body, however, he described this transformation as “surpassing physical limits.” Quoting artist and performer Marina Abramovic, who had a significant impact on him, Chen describes human transformation as the moment where the body’s physical limitations are surpassed, and the mind takes “a mental jump.” To him, the body was a vehicle for transformation, or for things to travel and transform through it. He believed the body wasn’t in accordance with the “traditional idea of meat and bones, [but] just a bunch of particles.”
The second phase of his work concerned “ecological change,” and he started “thinking of artmaking as more than personal expression, but [a] process of thinking about the world from an ecological perspective.” For his most recent project, he has been researching landmines planted in the Middle East. According to his research, “it costs less than a hundred dollars to make a landmine, but [more than] a couple hundred dollars to remove one.” At the pace that they are being removed, he said, it will take many years to clear all of the landmines from the ground. At the same time, civilians, especially farmers who work in the fields to survive, are being killed and injured by these landmines. His working title for the project is “Ruins for 2000 years from now,” a reference to Pompeii, and draws a similarity between the way Pompeii is currently seen and the way that our civilization will be seen by the population 2000 years from now.