Xing Danwen (Chinese: 邢丹文; born 1967) is a contemporary Chinese artist and photographer. She is known for the images she made during and after her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York, exploring ideas of dislocation as well as the form and psyche of contemporary living.
Biography Early life Xing Danwen was born in 1967 in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China. Her parents worked as engineers in a state-owned energy company.
Education The artist started her visual art practice with painting medium in her teens. From 1982 to 1986, she studied painting at the art school affiliated to Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts. From 1989 to 1992, she continued painting and earned her BFA in oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Art.
In the late 1980s, she was drawn to photography. Self-taught in photography, she was one of a few artists in the late '80s and '90s in China exploring the boundaries of photography and using photography as an art form. Through the camera, she observed and challenged the questions on Chinese society, humanity, female identity and the generation born in the '60s. Xing documented the performance art movement among the East Village artists in Beijing in the early 1990s.
In 1998, she went to New York with a grant and fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council, New York. There, she did her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York with a chairman grant from SVA from 1998 to 2001.
This New York period challenged and enriched her artistic experience. In her current art practice she works, besides photography, also in the field of mixed media, video and multi-media installations.
Her artistic practice is both rich and varied and her subjects include: Dislocation between cultural status, conflicts between globalization and traditions, problematic environmental issues, the urban drama between the desire and reality. Fiction, truth and illusion often play an important role in her works.
Career One of Xing's first major works was the series disConnexion (2002–03), large-scale photographs of wires, circuit boards, and other computer waste exported from the United States to China's Guangdong Province.
Xing began her series Urban Fiction in 2004, which features photographs of architectural maquettes that Xing encountered at real-estate developers’ offices into which she inserted cutout figures that are enacting a scene of domestic drama. Urban Fiction has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as part of the exhibition "Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China", and at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
In 2007, Xing continued her exploration of urban architecture and her relationship to the city of Beijing through the series Wall House.
Major artworks A Personal Diary 1993–2003, Photographs
In A Personal Diary, Xing presents a highly poetic work that evinces her acute ability to inscribe China's alternative art scene in the 1990s into her own personal narrative.
She represents her city through an eye disturbed by rapid urban development. It calls artists and their artworks from their studios to the streets, it witnesses the emergence of installation art in public spaces, and it accompanies and connects with performers in private apartments, evincing a strong, sensual closeness to them. The camera is frequently visible in the photographs, and so is the artist herself, as she captures people and events with passion for what is portrayed.
Born with Cultural Revolution 1995, B/W Photographs. Featured in ANU/Verso 2019 publication Afterlives of Chinese Communism edited by Christian Sorace, Ivan Fraceschini, nad Nicholas Lumbere.
I am a woman 1994–1996, B/W Photographs
SCROLL
1999–2000, B/W Photographs
Scroll is a series of panoramic photos of Beijing composed of many images that were shot in succession on 120 mm film. This method resulted in photos that are exceptionally long, narrow, and horizontal. The images were shot manually, without any computer manipulation or digitization. Danwen Xing relied on the film's original data, which she assembles into the final work.
Scroll A focuses on daily life and human activities in public spaces and Scroll B captures scenes of Beijing streets and buildings, resulting in haunting and poetic abstract images.
Sleep walking
2001, two-channel video installation
In Sleep Walking, Xing examines the effect of dislocation and how the mind can blur the distinctions between the past and the present, reality and fiction. The video weaves together images from different Western cityscapes accompanied by a soundtrack composed with Chinese traditional instruments and sounds of daily life in Chinese cities. The work implies a sense of loss and displacement, and evokes contending memories. Xing reconstructs reality, creating vigorous images infused with her visions of European Old Master paintings, the realities of these cities, and personal audial and visual memories.
disCONNEXION
2002–2003, Color Photographs
Xing's concerns are not only related to large cities. She has traveled to southern China to explore the effects of electronic trash recycling on villages and small cities in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province. In disCONNEXION, her critical eye and sharp lens examine the aesthetics of technological waste, reflecting environmental concerns, but more importantly, an anxiety about changes in the lives of workers along the south coast, whose ghosts can be sensed despite their absence from the frames.
Duplication
2003, Color Photographs
DUPLICATION is a photography series staged in different toy factories across South China. Danwen Xing observed the entire toy production process and how designs are made for the international market to match the desires of people in every corner of the world. The toys are made to represent ideal beauty, but Xing deconstructs this by focusing her critical lens on the process and exploring the aesthetics of the identical parts.
Although the photos show only a fraction of the huge quantities of toy parts made in the factories, the work urges the eye to examine their differences and search for individuality.
Urban Fiction
2004–present, photography with digital manipulation
In Urban Fiction, the city becomes unreal, synthetic, and almost empty of its inhabitants. The artist inserts theatrical scenes into a series of photographs of promotional models used by real estate companies, with her as the main actor in playful, fictitious incidents. Hovering between reality and fantasy, the scenes compensate for the sense of emptiness in exponentially-expanding cities.
Wall House
2007, Multimedia installation with photographs and video projection
In Wall House, Xing stages herself inside a building designed by John Hejduk in the Netherlands, and her lonely presence draws its magic from the urban landscapes of Chinese cities seen from the windows of the space. Captivated by her passion for the city, she summons it, and questions the reality of the borders between public, private, and subjective spaces.
Because I am in the Mountains
2017, Installation with coal-coke and mixed materials
This sculpture presents a panoramic miniature of a contemporary landscape made from coal coke, the synthetic material that results from burning coal. In this work, Danwen Xing creates a contrast between the polluting medium and the scene depicted. Confusion is triggered by the divergence between the apparent disaster that is contemporary life and the beautiful vision of a natural landscape from traditional Chinese ink art. Xing expresses clear concern for the threatened nature, but more importantly, she borrows a phrase from Chinese philosophy: standing on Mount Lu means that one cannot see its true face. She engages with a visible symbolic complex, recognizing that it is impossible to observe objectively when we are lost within ourselves.
Thread
2017, Two-channel video with Sound, HD, 10 mins
In this new work, Thread, Xing examines the complexity of communication and connection between people. The artist and her mother serve as the main characters. On one screen are the aged hands of the artist's mother, insistently knitting a dress with love and care, and on the other, the daughter wears the dress as it unravels with her movement. A feeling of liberation is evoked as the daughter's body slowly becomes exposed but also fragile, and vulnerable. The daughter is trapped in the thread, but she moves forward with an uncontrolled drive. Although the two actions are separate and seem contradictory, the viewer senses a complicity between mother and daughter, as if they share an unspoken, secret understanding.
Exhibitions Selected exhibitions include Seeing Utopia, Past and Future-Wang Di and Xing Danwen, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, US, 2010; In A Perfect World..., Ooi Botos Gallery, Hong Kong, 2009; Wall House, project space at Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, Australia, 2008; disCONNEXION, Kiang Gallery, Atlanta, US, 2004; and Urban Fiction, Galerie Piece Unique, Paris, France, 2004.
Solo and two person exhibitions
2017 A Personal Diary, Warsaw MOMA, Poland Captive of Love, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, China
2014 UTOPIA, Officine dell'Immagine, Milan, Italy
2010 A Personal Diary, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, US Chinese Modernism and U.S. Vernacular-Xing Danwen & Jim Vecchi, arCH-Architecture Center Houston Foundation, US Seeing Utopia, Past and Future-Xing Danwen & Wang Di, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, US A Personal Diary, Modern Chinese Art Foundation, Gent, Belgium
2009 A Personal Diary-China Avant-garde in 1990s, Modern Chinese Art Foundation, Gent, Belgium A Round Trip, Galerie SOLLERTIS, Toulouse, France Between the Walls, EPsite, Shanghai, China
2008 The City Fairy, Korea Art Center, Busan, Korea Wall House, Project Space at Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, Australia Xing Danwen & Zeng Han, FOTOFEST 2008, Berring & James Gallery, Houston, US
2007 Roland Fischer/Xing Danwen", Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse, France
2006 Urban Fiction, Gallery TPW, Toronto, Canada disCONNEXION/duplication, the Chinese Museum, Melbourne, Australia
2004 disCONNEXION, Kiang Gallery, Atlanta, US dis+dup, Gow Langsford gallery, Sydney, Australia Urban Fiction, Galerie Piece Unique, Paris, France
2002 Dislocation, the 2nd PingYao International PhotoFestival, Shanxi, China China Avant-garde", Ka-sing Lee gallery, Toronto, Canada
2001 Xing Danwen, Photo Festival at Galerie du château, Nice, France
1997 IN SIGHT, SOHO Photo Gallery, New York, US
1994 WITH CHINESE EYES, PHOTONEWS at Gallery Grauwert, Hamburg, Germany
Public collections Whitney Museum of American Art, New York The Progressive Corporation, US JGS Foundation, New York Estella Collection, New York Santa Barbara Museum of Art, US ICP, International Center for Photography, New York Smart Museum of Art, Chicago San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, US Groupe Lhoist, Belgium Dr. Sigg Collection, Switzerland UBS, Union Bank of Switzerland Centre Pompidou, Paris, France FNAC / Fonds National d'art Contemporain, France The Red Mansion Foundation, London Victoria and Albert Museum, London Groninger Museum, The Netherlands Busan Art Museum, Korea Singapore Art Museum, Singapore Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, China
Grants, awards and fellowships 1998–2001, Grant & Fellowship, Asian Cultural Council, US 2003, Best Publishing Project Award, Les Rencontres d’Arles Festival, France 2008, Finalists, ING REAL photography award, the Netherlands 2009, Asia 21 Fellow, Asia Society, US
Selected book publications Contemporary Photography in Asia