TEMPLE AND WAVES

SOOFA SUHE proudly presents Temple and Waves, a solo exhibition by young artist Xiguan Lei, curated by Robert Albouker, a curator from France. Xiguan Lei develops his work through a constant oscillation between the language of a singular and abstract contemporary art practice and a persistent return to the roots of tradition — tradition understood here as discipline, repetition, and the exercise of manual labor.

The artist seeks shared values between tradition and the necessary act of invention, aspiring to construct a world of peace brought forth through the triumph of the spirit. The material of this pursuit originates from the smallest unit of expression within Chinese art and thought: the brushstroke. Merely one stroke among the many that compose the Chinese characters forged by ancient masters, it becomes the foundation of his practice. Lei isolates this seemingly insignificant and orphaned stroke, seizing upon this minimal unit of writing and poetry and suspending it within the intoxication of repetition. He makes it stutter, endlessly retrieving it, endlessly repeating it, endlessly folding it, endlessly transforming it.

The brushstroke, together with the continuous variations imposed upon it, serves both as the material of the artist’s ink works and as the foundation of his sculptural practice. Yet it is through his sculptural works that one may fully grasp how his ink images — including those directly devoted to the atomic simplicity and endless repetition of the brushstroke itself — emerge from successive operations upon the stroke: from the square, then the square of the square, ultimately producing the mutable cubes that constitute the fundamental units of his installations.