Xia Yu: Golden Hour

Artist: Xia Yu

Curator: Laura Shao

Exhibition Dates: 2024.8.29 – 2024.10.6

Venue: HK K11 MUSEA

Address: 6F, Kunsthalle, K11 MUSEA, Victoria Dockside, 18 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Hive Center for Contemporary Art is delighted to present“Golden Hour”a major solo exhibition by our representing artist Xia Yu, on view from August 29 to October 6, 2024, at the K11 Musea Art and Cultural Center in Hong Kong. Signifying Xia Yu’s debut solo presentation in Hong Kong, this show features over 30 selections of signature paintings focusing on his evolving creative journey since 2020. This exhibition is curated and organized by Laura Shao.

For more than a decade, Xia Yu has consistently worked with tempera as his primary medium of practice. Through Xia’s continuous exploration and refinement, this historical material has manifested itself into a unique painting method with a translucent texture that embodies Eastern aesthetics, which in turn imparts new forms and meanings perceptive of the era. The title of the exhibition, “Golden Hour” is borrowed from a large-scale work that Xia created for his solo show at the Song Art Museum in Beijing in 2023. The artist has once again challenged the viewer’s understanding of the characteristics of tempera and his established style: the previously jade-like nebulous and subtle light and shadow multiply and overlay, erupting in intense and distinctive, almost mystical, flows of light and depth of perspective that portray the formerly casual, iconic figures of metropolitan lifestyles, bringing out the visually penetrating questions and examinations of present humanity’s existence itself. In the new works of this exhibition, the volumes of the figures are further expanded to larger-than-life; with multi-dimensional light traversing the confounding and boundless abstract space around the figure, a giant portrait is transformed into a monumental contemporary landscape.

The cinematographic term ‘golden hour’ refers to the precious moment after sunrise or before sunset when the sun’s golden radiance appears. At that moment, the influx of light is not only the subject of aesthetic beauty, but also a representation of time and direction, which ultimately reaches a shared understanding of significance through the capturer’s lens and the viewer’s gaze. Likewise, Xia Yu attempts to address the ‘decisive moments’ of life with his carefully arranged perspective and beams of light. Perhaps it was his brief experience of filmmaking after graduation that left traces of cinematic poetry and rational composition in Xia’s painting career. Day in and day out, he spends countless hours polishing the brilliant white base of tempera with gesso, creating a granular façade of luminance like the grainy texture of film, while reflecting a pristine halo of light from the underlying canvas. Light becomes both an object and a representation of space and dynamics: the falling raindrops in Glass Half Full are transformed into white space as light. Here, light, entity, and speed merge to become a whole. Whereas the majority of his paintings are permeated by a bright and tender scattering of light, Xia’s ‘light’ has been more thoroughly released in his past year’s works. Rather than the Caravaggio-style dramatic effects, this light refers more to a macroscopic and profound abstract composition. The intertwined light cuts out an architectural structure, like an intricate palace, linking the isolated individual in the painting to a vaster spatial and temporal construct. This kind of questing is always present in his works – in Xia’s perspective, “humans are the vessel of the times,” in that, all our behaviours and activities carry the features of the times, which are only imperceptible to us while we are in the midst of the current.

Reflecting on Xia Yu’s creative journey to the present, a process of constantly approaching and detaching, absorbing and reconstructing the representations of life can be found, in which he removes all kinds of memories, experiences, and fantasies with generational influences or symbols of consumerism from their cocoons, and gradually reduces them after careful abstraction, eventually returning to the truth. He understands that the perspective of painting as a viewfinder encompasses the symbolic meaning of a particular group of people or era. As shown in City Mountain, a night view of the city with distant mountain ranges constitutes the most prevalent and romantic visual experience of contemporary urban residents. This echoes Wu Hung’s words in The Double Screen: “A painting is an object or ‘item’, a representational ‘window’ or ‘screen’, or a pictorial illusion or ‘stage.’” (Wu 1996, 28)

Many classic art historical paradigms that Xia Yu embeds in his works can be easily found, revealing his profound cultural ambitions. The conqueror as a fitness bike rider, the thinker standing or sitting in meditation, and the recluse enjoying the mountains and the rivers… Xia Yu has repeatedly compared and retracted the meta-language of Eastern and Western visual experiences with the present and has keenly perceived the characteristics and differences only to this milieu during the process. The ‘decisive moments’ of the artist do not only lie in the dramatic narratives or sublime expressions but also in the present moment of existence. With the use of light, he fabricates the coordinates of time and space, at the centre of which stands the self, constantly examining and looking further, capturing the golden moments of the essence of life.

Curator Zhu Zhu once quoted the aesthetic relationship in Fan Zhongyan’s words “Rippling, golden light leaps off water. In stillness, the Moon’s reflection is much like sunken jade” to describe the clarity, luminosity, and Eastern temperament of Xia Yu’s translucent tempera. The largest work in this exhibition, the six-metre-long triptych Peach Orchard II, serves as Xia’s bold response to the Chinese aesthetic tradition. He hopes to “contribute some uniqueness to the immense universe of the visual experience of painting.” The pixel-like grid of light flecks in his works, those skipped or left blank, were once interpreted as a projection of the digitized networks and the virtual world. However, by revisiting them now, we may be able to reach a more open-minded interpretation. The figures walking towards the future in the light, absorbed in the present moment alone, the butterfly orchid glittering in the darkness of the night, both real and unreal, those flecks and beams of light that pass through the gap between the ordinary and the great, the individual and the generational, the virtual and the reality, flooding directly into our lives.

Text/ Laura Shao

Translation/ Chloe Yang

Spatial Design: UNVEIL LIMITED

Illumination Support：NOUMENON 现象照明

 Xia Yu, City Mountain, 2024, Tempera on board, 240 × 200cm

Xia Yu, Glass Half Full, 2024, Tempera on board, 240 × 220cm

Xia Yu, Orchid I, 2024, Tempera on board, 120 × 90cm

关于艺术家

艺术家夏禹（摄影：董林）

Xia Yu was born in Anhui, China, in 1981, graduated from the Third Studio of the Oil Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2004, and currently lives and works in Beijing. An artist of the post-80s generation, the personal life trajectory of Xia Yu and his generation inevitably finds a parallel reference in his paintings. From small town youth to the new urban middle class, from family to gender relation and then to the workplace, Xia Yu’s works, since his graduation from CAFA, have closely followed and reflected the lives of ordinary people, with the mundane helplessness and inadequacy, the typical happiness and joy. The figures have always been characterized by the artist in a very localized manner, with plump faces, delicate facial features, and unperturbed expressions, revealing a gentle and respectful nature that are difficult to distinguish between an innate disposition and a product of discipline. In the various scenes set up by Xia Yu, whether everyday or dramatic, these figures often manifest either elegant or witty physique, disclosing both of their ease and haste. These already subtle and imperceptible emotions are further softened and diluted by the artist’s signature tempera technique, converging the similar faces into a portrait of the majority that belongs to an era of China’s most rapid development.