Xie Qi: Tugging

Xie Qi was born in Chongqing, China, and now lives and works in Beijing, China. The body and portraits have long been important motifs in Xie Qi’s painting, appearing throughout her various creative periods. Drawing on a sweeping imagination and rich perceptions, Xie Qi bestows on these shifting figures the warmth of emotion, the tension of desire, and tones of gloom. She sources her subjects of depiction from friends, everyday objects (portrait-bearing banknotes, plants resembling human organs), candid photographs and classic themes, capturing and depicting them in an approach akin to “psychological profiling”—the artist refines the components of the image through observation and perception, adding or removing details, destroying and reconstituting whole forms, restoring the figure to magnify parts and moments filled with dramatic tension. Xie Qi’s depiction takes place between recollection and creation. The concealed brushstrokes, blurred boundaries and phantom colors of the pictures often radiate with a mysterious air from a past time.

In her latest floral iterations, Xie Qi transposes her sustained investigation of the bodily experience onto the anatomy of vegetation. No longer relegated to mere botanical mimesis, the blossom operates as a corporal allegory. Its soft petals interiorize a labyrinth reminiscent of vessels and neural networks, which grants the flora a faunal density. Through this latent anthropomorphism, the demarcation between flower and human dissolves; flower thus becomes a vessel for affect, libidinal drive, and memory, expanding what a portrait can be.

In keeping with her approach, Xie bypasses the idealized imagery of pristine blossoms, turning her gaze instead toward common, overlooked everyday plants such as morning glories, lilies, and orchids. In her work, these flowers are rarely seen at their peak; they linger instead at the threshold of budding or in the process of decay. This liminal moment untethers the flower from a decorative framing, transforming it into a metaphor for time, fragility, and the state of being.