Clear Ground, Example One     hahnemuhle photo paper   120*150cm/150*189cm   2020




Clear Ground, Example Two     hahnemuhle photo paper   120*138cm/150*173cm   2020




Clear Ground, Example Three     hahnemuhle photo paper   120*150cm/150*189cm   2020




Clear Ground, Example Four     hahnemuhle photo paper   120*150cm/150*189cm   2020

Details of a Moment     hahnemuhle photo paper   150*189cm   2020

Creating this series of photographic works, Fan Xi first examines and takes photos of outdoor garden environments, as if examining multi-dimensional sculptural entities. She selects and crops from the numerous photographs (ranging from 20 to 500 images) details and elements that demonstrate geographic or positional features, and produces the final artwork by accumulating, overlapping and combing the elements. The details are stripped from perspectives that might render them proper harmonious and fitting, and only remain as irregular, stark incompatibilities.

As the numerous images are being re-grouped in an approaching movement and are closing the distance, the meticulously layered details reveal the depth and thickness within a flat dimension. The artist believes that it is the most tangible form of human experience: one’s experience of a thing is not isolated, but is dissolved in and by other information. One develops such experience by approaching, distancing, forgetting and re-membering. Relationships as such cannot be fully recorded by a single flat dimension; angles and perspectives that were once described will eventually become what concludes the image. The artist deems that we experience the dimensions as such continuously, and one of her missions is to re-animate and nurture the things that are frozen by and in existing images. They are familiar and strange, excluding whoever is found within, just as the reality of the Real.