Xiong Wenyun

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

Birth, old age, sickness and death have always been an important topic in literary and artistic works. These issues are related not only to life and society, but also to the laws of life and growth in nature as well as throughout the universe.

Artworks Tibetan Medicine—Red and Tibetan Medicine—Blue address polarity and relativity between the forces of yin and yang. In Tibetan Buddhism’s concept of life and death, there is no separation between these two states of existence. The arrows and their colors represent people’s awareness of a mutual transformation and reincarnation that occurs between life and death.

“Life” and “death“ are two fundamental forces of life. The size of these two paintings may imply the artist’s struggle between these two energies at different points in her life.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

After a rainfall, these large and small Mani Stones (prayer stones) at the entrance of the Valley of the Kings (Tibet) gave the artist an impulse to paint colors on them. A realization came to the artist that life blends into nature. The large-scale performance artwork Moving Rainbow arose from this inspiration and, since then, most of the artist’s works bear an impression of this “rainbow.“ For the artist, a “moving rainbow“ travels along a road that connects an originary nature with modern civilization. We, ourselves, travel dimensions throughout our entire lives along this fault line between two contradictory modes of life. All artworks in the Rainbow Sky series have a “door” or “exit” element, like a door from the sky, leading to various times and spaces. This door may take the form of either fear, uneasiness, confusion, loss of control, rage, or their opposite. Perhaps this is the exit that the artist’s soul needs when observing and experiencing illness, life and death. The work Rainbow Sky Ⅱ in this exhibition will lead people’s thoughts to a distant and mysterious place, to a time and space full of primitive yin energy, guided by the bright rainbow (yang energy).

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

For many years, the artist has been searching for the root of her own personal power. Beginning with the levels of perception and sensibility, she organically structures contradictions that arise within individual life experience, society, and natural ecology. Her reference points are rational but express these sensible perceptions through simple and pure colors, thereby transcending limitations of her own individual life experience. This perception and expression of the boundless universe is almost intuitive.

If Rainbow Sky is an entrance, then The King of Tibetan Medicine seems to be a passageway composed of multiple life energies, ultimately leading to a reddish source of life’s vitality.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

According to Tibetan belief, all animals, plants, and minerals used in Tibetan medicine must be sourced in unadulterated nature.

Tibetan medicine theory believes that medicine relates to five elements, namely: earth, water, fire, air, and space. Moreover, there is a harmonious symbiotic relationship between plant growth, properties, flavor, and the natural environment.

The generous amount of red color in this artwork provides a lavish visual tension. Each sharp angle of geometric triangles reveals properties of the color “red“ as a symbol of the Tibetan people’s ardent desire for life. This fervent desire has arisen from their tenacious confrontation with disease and injury throughout the long history of Tibet. A prescription of Tibetan medicine serves as a vessel of the flow, transformation and continuation of this life energy.

Text: Zhong Ting

During the 2020 pandemic, Xiong Wenyun accompanied her sick mother throughout the latter’s hospital stay. The hospital smelled of illness, pain and death. The artist’s observations of hospitals, patients, diseases, life, and death combined with her individual unique life experience (especially the influence of Tibetan culture). She then recorded these observations in the form of abstract paintings which she painted on the back of medicine boxes. After her mother was discharged from the hospital, she began to paint in larger format upon easels, re-experiencing in the process an eternal cycle of birth and death.

Xiong Wenyun uses heavy colors and shadows to express her emotions, many straight lines, windows, and other elements, as if revealing her desire to restore order to a chaotic and repressed environment. Tibet is the habitat of her soul, and the combination of Tibetan culture, medicine, and hospital elements makes it possible for these works to express a full human experience. It can be said that this series is a metaphor for the integration of Xiong Wenyun’s embodied individual life into her environment.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

Walls seem to be a metaphor for protection and authority. The artist is full of the fear of disease and death. In the spiritual world, these indescribable fears are transformed into images which appear in her paintings. She built a wall in the spiritual world to protect her life and her boundaries. Above the city wall, there appears a significant black color, as if implying the nothingness between reality and illusion, whereby the artist is missing some important part of her soul, feeling helpless and lost.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

Compared with Tibetan Medicine Ⅰ, Tibetan Medicine Ⅸ addresses Tibetan cultural life as a meditation on pain. The black void is filled with red life energy, white squares and shadow parts are replaced with rainbow ribbons, and red walls are exchanged for the blue and purple of spirituality and wisdom. She begins to soothe anxiety and restore calm. Rainbow ribbons resemble the costumes of the Tibetan people. The artist finds a spiritual home in Tibetan culture. Perhaps she is no longer attached to Śūnyatā (Buddhist terminology meaning emptiness). Under the influence of Tibetan Buddhism, she finds the meaning of “emptiness” to achieve transcendence of her individual life.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

The red and white lines on the wall are indicative of the artist looking for spiritual support to break through a demanding situation. Now she is depressed and seeking motivation to go on with her life.

Piece Description:

Text: Xiong Wenyun

At the beginning of 2022, my 93-year-old mother passed away. During this period, many extraordinary events broke out at home and abroad, and my creative state was plunged into an abyss of extreme emotions. I suffer from the same fear of illness and death as everyone else. However, despite this overflow of emotion, I must maintain a high degree of rational control over the structure and color of my paintings. For me, the creation of Western Medicine series is more about understanding the structure of modern scientific design, while the process of creating Tibetan Medicine series concerns the experience of a cycle of life and death.

Text: Zhong Ting

The white squares are like energy forms of the spirit or soul, released from the body to float between life and death. Throughout the Tibetan medicine series, there are shadows under these small white squares, seeming to imply that the individual has not perished, that the soul or spiritual energy body flows onward, transforming, even changing its color throughout different points of memory, experiencing or reproducing the life state of the artist in her different periods of human and non-human existence.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

The life energy of the individual flows to the edge of life and death. From the illusion of calm there arises a curiosity to explore. The world of death is mysterious, and so is the world of life. It’s as if an unknown force has emerged to draw a sharp line between life and death.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

We can’t tell whether the window is facing inwards or outwards, whether we are inside or outside it. Behind the desire for peace is the elusive deep sea of the subconscious mind called “destiny.”

Piece Description:

Text: Xiong Wenyun

In the days and nights of the first anniversary of my mother’s death in early 2023, these concrete and transcendent scenes played out incessantly, in which I experienced the last hours before death, and greeted the salvation of my soul in the illusion of this. Repeatedly, however, the act of seeking expressive symbols for my paintings pulled me back to harsh reality.

Piece Description:

Text: Xiong Wenyun

From 1998 to 2001, artist Xiong Wenyun visited Tibet seven times, implementing the comprehensive art project “Moving Rainbow“ along the Sichuan-Tibet and Qinghai-Tibet highways. Throughout this long-term and large-scale project, Xiong integrated conceptual, performative. and environmental interventions. Moving Rainbow sees the artist covering trucks with colorful tarpaulin canvas, then sending these envoys along the 1,400-kilometer Sichuan-Tibet Line. Along the route, the artist and her team got out to paint tree stumps with bright colors, bringing attention to deforestation occurring amidst rapid economic development. Over three years’ time, Xiong Wenyun created 200 colorful tarpaulins, persuading truck drivers heading into Tibet to participate in becoming part of the ‘moving rainbow,’ then organizing a ‘rainbow team’ to go deep into Tibetan areas, promoting the protection of this plateau environment, finally reaching the Everest base camp.

Text: Zhong Ting

“The revelation of this world is in the wilderness—this may be the hidden connotation of the wolf’s howl, which has been understood by the mountains, but remains very little comprehended by man.” (Aldo Leopold) The disappearance of the wolves does not mean paradise for the hunter. When the shepherd kills all the wolves, it inevitably means that he will need to take over the wolves’ role to avoid the proliferation of sheep along with ecological imbalance. The ecosystem has its own balance, in which human beings are hunters and sheep. Artist Xiong Wenyun takes over the work of the wolves, even if she did not intend to do so at the beginning of her creation, which was inspired by Mani Stones at the entrance of the Valley of Kings (Tibet). She was deeply impressed by the fact that these stones, large and small, contained an aura of life, and thus, in the interplay of heaven, earth, and human beings, she stepped into the creative process of Moving Rainbow. Starting from an instinctive emotional impulse, she painted colors on the stones, feeling the joy of blending things together with herself, then externalizing an inner sensual power within the artistic practice of “a fusion of feelings with the natural setting,” triggering her own and even society’s extensive concern about indiscriminate deforestation. This process embodies a “butterfly effect,” where small actions lead to all-encompassing change. As the artist has said, Moving Rainbow connects originary nature with modern civilization. She often feels the contradiction between the two, and that she is caught between these two trajectories of the human soul. This contradiction may be the reason why Xiong Wenyun shows the remarkable power of yin and yang in her abstract paintings. This flowing state of life in nature continues throughout Xiong Wenyun’s artwork, revealing interconnections of healing power between nature, culture, the body, and our inner spirit.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

Rainbow Tent is the artist’s response to the Moving Rainbow project, reflecting on environmental problems faced by mankind. Using rainbow truck tarpaulin, the artist created 108 colorful tents in the form of an interactive art installation to reward the 108 organizations and individuals who donated to the Moving Rainbow project.

Piece Description:

Medicine is related directly to the body. This performance artwork sees the artist transform medicine packaging used in her daily medical regimen. Packaging designs of these medicine boxes convey concepts, sensibilities, and aesthetic consciousness of diverse cultural paradigms, the implications of which go so far as to include views on life and death. Through dissembling medicine boxes and appropriating their structure and design, she incorporates these new shapes into own performance artwork. Thus, she re-cognizes the influence of different traditional civilizations and modern technologies on human bodies and psyches. She then invites the audience to join in and experience the integration of abstract art into their own life along perceptual and rational levels.

Prepare a certain number of used medicine boxes from my medical regimen. Disassemble the medicine boxes of varied sizes and shapes, using the various shapes on the back of the medicine box to re-compose patterns, colors, and modeling characteristics onto the front side of the medicine box using watercolor markers. Reference can be made to pattern elements or written text found on other medicine boxes. The process can be improvised or orchestrated. During the action, interested audience members are invited to participate. The finished work is displayed on a wall or in a frame.

Performance Process:

Text: Xiong Wenyun

The artist’s individual performance lasts about 30 minutes, and then audience members are invited to participate, for a total duration of 45minutes. Materials: markers, paper knives.