Unlike some women artists, Chen Xi does not emphasize feminism or engage in art through a feminine lens. Her focus is on how, as a living individual, she can experience and expound on this world in which she exists.
Her artistic beginnings were marked by Expressionist vocabulary. In the 1990s, her fervent, youthful way of life began to influence her artistic leanings. She came to know the literature of Gabriel García Márquez, John Updike, and Franz Kafka early on, finding resonance in their expressive language. Her personality, her reading, and her experience of a unique era formed an important foundation for Chen Xi's art, shaping her desire to constantly observe and question the shifting society around her. We can easily draw connections here to certain European Expressionist artists in the first half of the 20th century who documented the everyday life and stories they experienced. Chen Xi's focus, however, was more on the stimulation stemming from the observation of reality, like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, rather than on the inner turmoil of such artists as Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka.
Owing to her restless personality and yearning for change, Chen Xi has always been keenly attuned to the shifts in the art world. By the year 2000, conceptualism was ascendant in China. Painting techniques and styles became tools freely chosen to serve the artist's goals. Chen Xi opted for academy techniques, generally not chosen lightly by contemporary artists, to express her constantly expanding inner freedom. She shifted her understanding of herself, causing a very real-looking woman's form to appear on the streets and other bustling public settings. She was casting off common themes in search of uniqueness and seeking a shift in her language as an artist. The subject was the "self", albeit one that was placed in the dangers of the social environment. The artist aimed to express the awkwardness and inner contradictions of the individual in a rapidly changing era.
Using academy techniques to focus on society and history, Chen Xi became drawn to the probing and expression of "memory". Chinese Memories tells the story of the history experienced by Chen Xi's generation. Televisions from different eras and corresponding news images come together to form a serial, historic whole marked by rich changes. This series, completed over a period of years, expanded Chen Xi's artistic conceptions into real objects—those television screens and their broadcast images turned Memories into a powerful expression echoing the artistic phenomena of installation and video art that emerged in the late 1990s, while the language of the paintings effected a conceptualization of academy techniques. People were drawn to the stories of these images, finding simple, warm memories with a human touch.
Object Language is the artist's record of everyday spiritual life as an individual, the ripples of Chen Xi's expression inspired by familiar objects. The temptation to treat these works—perhaps a small wooden carving or a small pet—as lead-ins to sentiments, associations, and metaphors is not unfounded. Even so, Chen Xi's conceptual objective is not entirely in the realm of the subconscious but is fixed on social and human issues. As she says: "What I worry about are not individual questions or those of a particular group, but about the psyche and actions of all of humanity today." John Updike's "Rabbit", or perhaps Joseph Beuys' questioning, prompted the artist to use her individual stories to explore broader questions of the individual in human society. Like a ray of light illuminating the inner mind, Chen Xi found greater spiritual freedom. Once the image of the rabbit emerged, How to Explain What Has Happened to the Deceased became the artist's all-out response to this era of rapid change. Chen Xi used rabbits in different contexts to answer her own deepest questions: when possibilities appear before me, how do I face the future? How does an individual seek salvation when they are utterly alone? What does life mean when the pace of social change outstrips our ability to adapt? Religious salvation was not the starting point for Chen Xi, but, as she states, with the constant intangible presence of ideology, and the fragmentation of values due to the chaotic social order, the images of art history offer the artist a way to piece things back together. If the questioning of a hare retains the warmth of carbon-based life, then the questioning of a robot foretells the terror humanity faces today in the age of AI.
In Chinese culture, the "ferry boat" alludes to questions that arise over the course of life. In this exhibition's wooden installation Lost, Chen Xi uses the same theme to express her inner perplexity. This work and the rabbits completed at various points in time tell the story of a rabbit constantly under the influence of its environment and others. Rooted in the 2020 Covid pandemic and the feelings of release that followed, the Inside/Outside series, and the other works she completed in 2023 based on constantly emerging images, express the artist's existential torment and complex sentiments: such titles as Times of Pain, Rotting Apple, Resplendent Dust, and So Near Yet So Far are themselves markers of the artist's inner freedom and turmoil. The artist hopes through the trajectories of rabbits in different contexts, to cast this jumbled mess of questions out before each of us in the contemporary predicament, reminding each one of us that we are nothing more than troubled rabbits ourselves.
Chen Xi's art is a psychological depiction of her views on the changes in Chinese society since the Reform and Opening-up in 1978, and her own views on this changing world. Viewers can thus treat Chen Xi's art as an iconography of a changing China from the 1990s to the present, as well as the history of a woman's coming of age amidst these changes. Like John Updike, Chen Xi has expressed critical observations of everyday work and family life across different stages of her art, noting her skepticism of and departure from traditional values—as a participant in the movement of rising Chinese women artists in the 1990s; having experienced shifts in her own individual experience, having observed the relationships between the individual, society, and the state, and having come to a new way of seeing history. In 2018, the Beijing Minsheng Art Museum exhibited her Rabbit on the Run series, in which the artist defines her self-image as that of a contemporary woman artist who does not back down in the face of adversity. Chen Xi says: "After that, I was constantly asked, why do I paint the rabbit? My answer is, the rabbit is me, and it is us… The sudden emergence of the rabbit in 2017, while I was preparing works for this solo exhibition, was somewhat connected to the novels, but was more of a reflection of my mental state at that time. Previously a perennial optimist, I sank into a state of anxiety and sorrow. Perhaps it was because some of my tenets of faith fell apart, or perhaps it was my disappointment and indignation at certain human behaviors, or even doubts about myself. In any case, there was a powerful sense of helplessness I had never felt before. I was plagued by my own problems and the disasters regularly unfolding in the world. When these sentiments encountered Beuys' outlook on nature, and joined with the image of a black rabbit that had already emerged in my Object Language series, the highly symbolic rabbit emerged."
The artist's practice revolves tightly around the Chinese reality, constantly engaging in different linguistic experiments. To this day, she continues to further outline her most intimate perplexities, raising questions from the depths of her heart to engage the world in dialogue. Thus, this exhibition provides the viewer with a compelling case study through which to understand the state of Chinese contemporary art.