CLC Gallery Venture is pleased to present Fan Xi’s exhibition Within 5m, showcasing a number of recent photographic and cinematic works by the artist. In her long-term practice, Fan Xi explored the profound impact of spatial and psychological distance and the act of distancing on sensorial experience. Working in photography, film, sculpture and installation, she examines the interwoven relationships between everyday experience, the production of fictions, and heterogeneous times.
For the exhibition L’s Living Room in Nuremberg in 2020, Fan Xi presented a large-scale room installation from the series she has developed in recent years. The furniture, books, plants and clocks nurture an eerie domestic environment, summoning the inner experience of actively escaping from linear temporal trajectories. For Within 5m, - the title of which suggests the safety-danger dialectics of distance and touch - Fan Xi returns to the photographic and cinematic aspects of her practice, re-imagines the flat, fictional nature of space, and presents another significant strand from her diverse oeuvre: a nourishment of images. For the Clearing series of photographs, started in 2019, the artist takes a large number of shots of common flowers and lawns from various perspectives. Fan Xi then carries out a laborious digital ‘flower arrangement’ process, by placing elements from more than five hundred images together, against a void, blue background. The faint blue that is in fact the sky of Beijing affirms the surreal nature of the pseudo-botanical study in the foreground: each and every detail of the anonymous flowers and grass from unnoticed corners, parks and greenbelts are real, and the artist’s photographic intervention truthfully records the wilderness of the plants within and without time. Yet, as a whole, each Clearing grows chaotically, inorganically and a-temporally, only on the basis of being heterogeneous to the various hereby grafted parts. Further developing the method conceived in 2014 as Fan Xi was creating the monumental Tree, the Clearing series is attentive to the neglected and the isolated by examining closely its numerous conditions and phases.
In the summer of 2019, Fan Xi participated in the offshore residency program on the island of Pulau Dinawan, Malaysia. In 2020 she included two video works shot on the island in the exhibition When to sail? at the Guangdong Museum of Art, 17’17’’, and L. L tells a quixotic story; the protagonist L is to build a house above the sea, and eventually has it washed away by waves. L is not just a person, but an ensemble of four individuals’ experiences. For the artist, touches and contacts that only take place occasionally, arbitrarily and unnoticeably are the only thing that is tangible and real in L’s life; this species of barely noticeable touch, is also the artist’s preeminent gesture, as she treats and nurtures images, scenes and natural environments. By re-mixing the soundtracks of the two video works and by partially re-staging the pseudo-natural atmosphere of the When to sail? exhibition, Within 5m demonstrates the diversity of Fan Xi’s practice since 2014. Its de-totalized, wild fashion points disclose the significance of distance of excess, weak touch, and temporal heterogeneity, at a time that is sabotaged by the conspiracy of nature and spirituality.
