Xie Molin and the Persistence of a Mark

March 15th, 2025

I can’t believe on my way to my third exhibition of the day it began to snow! I braved the Chicago adjacent gust of cold, wind flurries to the Beijing Artist Commune. A large factory like gallery in the back of Beijing’s 798 District to see White.

Xie Molin takes relief painting to another landscape with paintings that are bold and illusionary in their precision and monotone color way.

Walking into the Commune you are greeting wall text and immediately to the left the paintings await your … confusion. At first each white 59.1x59.1 inch (150.2x150.2 cm) painting seem like lenticular printing, an illusion no less. The work is all acrylic white paint, brought about over the last three years of Molin’s arduous mark making of horizontal lines and flicked dots consistently in line one after the other vertically. The artist works with machines to construct patterned and hypnotic works which leave the viewer stunned at the detail and exactitude of it all.

Imagine looking at a microscopic bee hive made of upturned water droplets. As you move to the right the horizontal hills begin to encroach on this terrain. Little by little painting by painting, the horizon overtakes the initial pattern making until it simply is over ridden by the following invasion of horizontal lines. Each line exactly the same distance from one another, each dot the same distance from the next gives the impression that these paintings were painstakingly achieved, yet because the marks are all but perfect instills a sensibility of grace and undeniably elevated craft of a master in his methods and an engineer whose creations are right on the money. The concave shapes devised by his machines are unmistakable as something only aesthetically planned by a seasoned artist who knows the Chinese art market.

While speaking to Xie I realized that the work has a similar resemblance to to the artist in how silent it is. I actually mistook him for someone else, to my embarrassment and felt that I even needed to whisper to him. Another mistake I bet.

My only critique of the show would be that after seeing the work, there was little room for conversation or activations. As someone who goes to art shows and generally any place alone, Im always looking to strike up conversation with someone and a common aspect of the event be it their drink, a pamphlet, etc. The artist is not one of many words it seems, so an item to do, eat, or take part in would have been a good addition to the show to get people engaged. There’s very little archival or ephemeral material present either which is a pity. I would have loved a textured mailer or brochure to take with me to remember the show.

But maybe, the lack of things and a bare bones show was important for the viewer to sit and examine the work. Based on the wall text it seemed pretty straight forward so if striking dialogue was the purpose of a huge gap between the work and the wall text, I think this was not necessarily achieved. It exudes a minimalist flare of the West while maintaining the principles of Chinese aesthetics and creating substance or white space within a canvas (no pun intended I promise).

White is on view until May 10th.