*Geng Xue “Mr. Sea” video detail video - “Mr. Sea” Solo Show at Zero Art Center, 2014.*
*http://en.cafa.com.cn/mr-sea-geng-xues-solo-exhibition-opened-at-zero-art-center.html*

Geng Xue’s oeuvre consists of mesmerizing odes to the timeless medium of Chinese porcelain ceramics in congruence with contemporary stop motion animation practices. Geng Xue treasures her traditional Chinese culture, and this is widely apparent in her work’s historical references. However, Xue is a modern woman, and seeks to champion traditional mediums towards a revival. Using the language of film, Xue has infused her ceramics and sculptures with new possibilities and contemporaneity.

Further than Xue’s aesthetics, her work is layered in historical, social, and psychological references. These many possibilities for association, for those familiar with the Chinese cultural context or not, make the work, intimate, alluring, and uncanny. Her work is also romantic and intense, filled with the repressed energy of desire. Her artistic practice is critically engaging, and this essay will analyze these contextual layers and why they are significant to the legacy of Chinese contemporary art.

Xue was born in 1983, in Baishan, China a city northeast of Beijing, whose region shares a border with North Korea. Most notably, Xue was a student of the important artist and President of the highly selective Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Xu Bing. She graduated at CAFA in Beijing as a ceramics major, and completed a master’s degree in the CAFA Department of Printmaking in 2014. She has remained in Beijing ever since, living and working in the capital today.

Xue treasures her traditional Chinese culture, specifically porcelain ceramics. On her affinity for porcelain, Xue has shared that her preferences root in her passion for the long history of porcelain within Chinese art. On the topic of her origins she has shared, “I was playing with modeling clay since I was a kid … I was fascinated by the richness of transformations this material can undergo.”

After working with porcelain ceramics through a traditional practice for many years, Xue sought a way to “revive” the medium. Xue sought to bring porcelain, a medium historically seen as stationary and fragile, a new life, and to widen the possibilities of visual language for more imaginative narratives. Xue has shared her belief that, “art should be romantic and full of imagination”, and her work demonstrates her intentions for her creations are for them to live, and to love. Xue’s artistic practice is a masterly balance of traditional techniques and a contemporary perspective. Drawing from a rich tradition, Geng utilizes the symbolic language of porcelain, and its uniquely embedded historical meaning, in rethinking and revitalising age-old artistic practices.

There are several key themes in Xue’s work that anchor it to important aspects of Chinese culture. This essay will analyze her use of porcelain and its effectiveness to preserve the legacy of the medium in an contemporary context. It will argue that Xue’s work takes an uncanny approach to the porcelain figures of her films, infusing the inanimate objects with a life of movement and emotion that can make viewers uneasy. This use of the uncanny allows her to investigate deeper issues of social repression unique to the Chinese cultural context. Finally, Xue’s evolution through film and stop motion animation will be analyzed to consider the mediums legacy in the Chinese context. The works analyzed will be Xue’s prominent work video Mr. Sea, 2014 along with video work Poetry of Michelangelo, 2015 and sculpture Along the River, 2008, those most fitting to dissect some of the contextual references Xue makes.

*Geng Xue “Along the River” detail porcelain sculpture - “Mr. Sea” Solo Show at Zero Art Center, 2014.*
*http://en.cafa.com.cn/mr-sea-geng-xues-solo-exhibition-opened-at-zero-art-center.html.*

*Geng Xue “Along the River” panorama installation 15m long - “Mr. Sea” Solo Show at Zero Art Center, 2014.*
*http://en.cafa.com.cn/mr-sea-geng-xues-solo-exhibition-opened-at-zero-art-center.html*

The earliest work examined is Along the River, 2008 a sculptural installation consisting of small porcelain figures in a vast and emotive scene. Along the River, 2008 explores the intricate possibilities of porcelain, consisting of many small scale blue and white porcelain sculptures, mostly of passionate, presumably young, girls clamouring over each other. The installation functions like a scene and shows boats, broken bridges and houses over a “river” piled high with white sand. The boats and the bridges are overflowing with the female bodies with a range of emotions, some ecstatic and some writhing and moaning.

There is a discomfort in the contrast of the pure, ivory tones of innocent female bodies and the clamorous and disorderly manner they are entrangling and multiplying on top of one another. The passionate emotions on the figures give a lustful air, emphasizing a seeming vitality in the young girls’ bodies. Some of the figures have two heads, or many heads as a reflection of clamour between numerous states of being of a certain ego. The works seems to contemplate the entrance of young girls, not yet contaminated by material desires, into the “carnival” of flowing desires and the “freakish” manifestations of repression found of contemporary culture. The vigorous river of the human world, carries the desires of the people towards a carnival of narcissistic bodies and physical desires swelling indefinitely in self-performance.

Xue’s use of porcelain is quite significant, as porcelain has been a symbol of Chinese culture traced back thousands of years. It is incomparable in its irreplaceability in presenting depictions of the body. Materially, porcelain features a smooth surface and luminescent transparency of natural similarity to skin. In terms of aesthetic isomorphism, porcelain holds mysterious traits that align with the paradoxical traits of the body. Porcelain is at once sturdy and fragile, long lasting and vulnerable, and (before firing) changeable and unique. The ancient use of porcelain in bodily representation elaborates it easily in the contemporary context, while maintaining its historical embedding. This contextual embedding has rendering porcelain irreplaceable in terms of aesthetic value in the eyes of the Chinese cultural context. Xue follows this traditional use of porcelain to represent the body to present the contemporary body in connection with and in reflection of traditional Chinese culture.

Porcelain is also intrinsic to the daily life of China’s people, traditionally regarded as an expression of beauty kept in the home like an everyday object. However, unlike other household objects, porcelain told a story. A stories of love, strength, purity, and resonance through its paint work and its material. These features of the material are residual elements of a long held traditional symbolism. It’s for this symbolism that Xue works with the material.

The second layer of significance in the work are the strange feelings of uneasiness that the installation’s emotiveness can ensue. The work is without abjection or repulsion, but rather is quite uncanny, as Xue utilizes familiar icons and materials to upheave deeply repressed social abnorms. The figures in the work are painted in the dress and physique of young girls in the nature of purity, and are idealistically inverted, and exposing of repressed emotions of lust, desire, and narcissism, through orgastic bodies. The figures, however made in traditional style, hold contemporary position, contemporary in the sense of emotions and gestures newly embraced as part of accepted social sphere. The figures hold themselves in alluring positions, embracing their bodies naturally insinuating a near lusty self regard. This sensuous style of self love opposes a traditional Maoist temperment of the collective over individuality.

Here a note on “The Uncanny”, the western theoretical analysis by Sigmund Freud, which holds weight within the social contexts of this work. Freud saw “the uncanny” as a psychological issue as well as an aesthetic one. He was interested in art and objects that seemed to be designed to conjure a feeling previously repressed to reveal its possibility, and its suppression. Freud defines “the uncanny” as the emergence of “something long known to us, once very familiar”, that is “terrifying” because it has been “established in the mind [as] estranged ... by the process of repression”. In other words, an object or design has reemerged as a reminder of an experience, memory, or fetish that which Freud considers “ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light”.Along the River, 2008 is uncanny because it is testing the reality of two conflicts of judgement; the fragility of porcelain, and the suppression of over sexual desire in Chinese culture. The figures are highly sexualized and alluring, and the use of porcelain renders the surface of the figures skin-like, all generating a sense of the uncanny. The figures also seem uncanny because they are moulding in intimate positions, in opposition to the familiarity of porcelain being stiff and fragile, not flexible as would be needed for intimate actions. We will see this uncanny “unreality” further, in Xue’s stop motion works using the porcelain figures. Comprehensively, this work is uncanny for depicting the body being desiring by instinctual human nature, with is hardly seenseen in the material age, rendering it strange and unfamiliar.

The second work to be discussed is the visually stunning cinematic marvel, Xue’s Mr. Sea, 2014. Thirteen minutes long, the short film is reminiscent of a Tim Burton animation, moody and eerie, bathed in cool blue shadows contrasted to a stark white moonlight. The film depicts a forest in the night, with trees of smooth, white, porcelain that are leafless yet tremble in the unseen wind. Intricately detailed porcelain flowers bloom and sway, seductively and uncannily on the forest floor. The visual tone is cool, using mostly pure white porcelain splashed with precise blue cobalt stains. The soundscape is a unique score of high pitch ringing and the plucking of a string instrument, cementing an uneasy mood. The tone and score of the film generate classic tones of drama, before the narrative even begins. The film follows a narrative of porcelain figures within the scene, meeting and making love in the forest. The film is sensual, and depicts subjects up close, sometimes abstractly. Water drips slowing across the smooth surfaces of the porcelain. In a stark comparison, the film also depicts bright red blood, oozing from eyes and bubbling in puddles on the ground.

Shocking and hypnotic, the visual aspect of the work alone is immensely appealing. The film moves fluidly through the narrative, rendering it quite easy to watch it repeatedly. The narrative however, is worth closer examination as it is deeply rooted in historical references. The film is based on a story from Strange Tales of Liaozhai or Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a classic tale of love and tragedy from Qing dynasty that was written by Pu Songling and published in 1740. Of Songling’s supernatural stories, all very well known in China, Xue unfolds the “Killing the Serpent” (translated to “The Mystery Island”) in her ghostly short. Xue’s story choice is significant in that she chose to contemporize a story well known by the local Chinese audience, as well as intriguing a global audience by the familiarity of the fairytales. This demonstrates another successful revival of a classic concept. Of this story choice, Xue affirms, “I chose this tale because I wanted to rely on a story that was well-known instead of writing my own script—everybody knows Liaozhai Zhiyi in China, so it can be easier to understand for the local audience—and Mr. Sea has an ideal mix of beauty, eroticism and violence which I found ideal for my movie.”

The story tells the tale of a brave young explorer, Zhang, who arrives by boat to the ghostly shores of a secluded island, destined for a spiral of passion and tragedy. He wanders the pristine white forest peacefully, while ominous tones play on. He walks, admiring flowers that “remained always in bloom”, when two lumps of dark clay appear. The first lump transforms into a teapot, the second into a cup from which an elixir is served to Zhang. As he drinks, from within the cup, appears a fire and the cup transforms back into a lump of clay. The clay, envelops in orange flames, then drops from Zhang’s hand and lands on the ground. The clay immediately starts to grow until almost his size, and suddenly a mysteriously beautiful woman emerges from the clay dressed in a cloak. The young woman implies that she belongs to a “Mr. Sea”, who is currently away. Zhang is immediately seduced by her beauty, and they have sex in the middle of a forest clearing. The scene is is alluring yet discomforting, mostly attributed to the sound of taps and scratching of the rubbing porcelain. This detail of sound requires deeper engagement of the audiences audible senses, psychosomatically tying the significance of the material to the uncanny feelings that surface in this erotic scene.

The woman’s form changes again, and her porcelain body is shattered into pieces, Zhang looking down at the puddle of bubbling blood left behind. The shattered pieces move and are transformed, and emerges “Mr. Sea”, a sinister sea serpent that ruthlessly chases Zhang through the shadows of the forest, eventually capturing him and feeding from his blood. However, in a romantic saving of the day, the elixir Zhang had consumed earlier, made his blood is poisonous for the sea serpent, and the monstrous creature dies. What is significant of the scenes with the sea serpent is the emphasis on the stop motion aspects of the serpents slither and movements. The final result is impressive, especially being that this is Xue’s first work with stop motion. On this experience she has shared, “I wanted to try a new language and combine it with my love for porcelain, so Mr. Sea can be considered my first experience with video. I did everything on my own and I had friends from the industry teaching me how to deal with a camera and lights.” The video aspect of the work brings an even more overt contemporaneity, and is a visual evolution from the installation of figures in Along the River, 2008. Another aspect of stop motion and its roots in traditional Chinese culture is puppetry. By using puppetry, Xue acknowledges yet another of the ancient Chinese art forms.

Lastly, the stop motion process revisits the uncanny layer of the porcelain figures. The stop motion animation makes the “unreality” of the porcelain figures ability to move and rub against each other, a reality and proves the repression of porcelain fragility once again surmounted. The final result is an work of emotion, aesthetic, and objects come to life. Xue brings life to her porcelain, delivers a thrilling atmosphere, and creates a vivid world of magic in darkness. Though the fantasy sparks our imaginations, it's the sensuous aspects of smooth surfaces, moisture drips in a dense forest, and the echoes of love and pain that resound in the porcelain bodies, that makes everything seem real.

*Geng Xue “Poetry for Michelangelo” video detail video - “Mr. Sea” Solo Show at Zero Art Center, 2014.*
*https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/geng-xue/.*

*Geng Xue “Poetry for Michelangelo” video detail video - “Mr. Sea” Solo Show at Zero Art Center, 2014.*
http://en.cafa.com.cn/rethinking-the-sensuous-noumenon-value-of-art-empathy-the-first-large-scale-sculptural-exhibition-opened-at-the-song-art-museum.html/00-featured-image-of-geng-xue-the-poetry-of-michelangelo-video-screenshot

The final work discussed, and the most recent of the works. Is the short film Poetry of Michelangelo, 2015. The short film is a 19 minutes performance piece by Xue using stop motion animation, in which she slowly sculpts a life size man out of clay, eventually breathing him into life. As she sculpts, there are subtitles of poetry written by Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo (1475-1564). The film also shows captioned instructions on her sculptural methods, alongside the poetry, describing the process of sculpting and comparing the creative to “an act of divinity motivated by love.” Xue’s ritual of sculpting is sensuous, her body is constantly in direct contact with her medium, and her look at the clay is enamoured. She strokes the clay, caressing it, completes the man’s form and kisses it. She then breathes life into the man, and then uses stop motion animation to allow him responsive moment to her. However, in a sharp turn from the romance of the situation, Xue prepares for the next stage of the sculptural process, which requires dismembering the man to fit the pieces in the kiln. Compared the context of the previous scenes, it appears as if she is murdering her beloved.

The significance of this work is two fold; its reference to the Chinese “Renaissance”, and to the ever present theme of sculptor or artist as a God-like creator. Of Michelangelo, Xue has been expressive of her admiration, stating, “He is a Renaissance master. There are a lot of reasons why I borrowed his name to express myself, and one of the reasons is because of the world renaissance itself. In Chinese society, we also talk about cultural renaissance and revitalization. Renaissance refers to the peak of an existing culture”. There is an obvious romanticism echoed through the work, that can be associated with the renaissance period as well. These references to the Renaissance reiterate Xue’s desire to revive traditional values, by juxtaposing contemporary perspectives and historical climaxes in the visual arts. Secondly, Xue breathes life into her sculpted man in Poetry of Michelangelo, 2015 and then takes that life away. This can be interpreted as Xue playing God, or refering to the notion of artists as God which can be traced to the Renaissance again, during a period of the cultural norm of the “cult of consecrated artist”. It was Michelangelo who was referred to during his lifetime as il Divino (the divine one) who, just like God, possesses the power of creation and the power of destruction.

In conclusion, Xue’s work demonstrates an imaginative way to preserve traditional art forms with a revival in contemporaneity. Xue successfully evolves treasured mediums of her cultural legacy and invites them into a world of higher technology and more free social circumstances to watch the medium blossom. Further than the aesthetic beauty and cultural pride of her works, the true pièce de rèsistance are the deeply emotional and psychological allusions. She frees her creations from moral and material social confinements, and directly confronts the suppressions in Chinese culture, especially the suppression of human desire. Her work uses passion, romance, and fear to prove the possibility of emancipation from social constraints through embracing human expressions of emotion and love. Down to the impossible thought of rubbing of porcelain on porcelain, Xue seeks an acknowledge of the alternate possibilities, and the necessary evolution towards greater possibilities of freedom, in artistic practice and in social practice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biennale of Sydney. “Geng Xue.” Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/geng-xue/.
Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny'” (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, London, 1953-1974.
Hongxia, Zhang. "Body of Desires Beneath Porcelain Skin." Ceramics, Art and Perception no. 99 (Mar, 2015): 74-77.
JN Projects. “Geng Xue.” Artists. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.jnprojects.net/portfolio/geng-xue-%E8%80%BF%E9%9B%AA/.
https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.sothebysinstitute.com/docview/1736627509?accountid=13958.
Songling, Pu. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Translated by Herbert A. Giles. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2010.
Toni, Alessandro De. “Xue Geng’s Stop-Motion Film Mr. Sea.” Cool Hunting. 11 June 2014. https://coolhunting.com/culture/mr-sea-xue-geng/.
Xue, Geng. “Mr. Sea.” In China Exchange forum, 2016. http://chinaexchange.uk/events/1836-2/. Accessed on 1 April 2019.
Xue, Geng. “Mr. Sea.” video. 2014.
Yiyang, Shao. ““Poetics of the body – The statue and images of Geng Xue.” CAFA ART INFO. September 13, 2017.

Chinese Contemporary: Geng Xue

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