798 Avant Gallery
511 W 25th St
Suite 502
10001
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: 212.216.9018
m: 646.460.5136
f: 212.807.8268
w: www.798avantgallery.com
Cang Xin No Body. No.2. Oil on canvas, 180 x 140 cm, 2007
798 Avant Gallery is proud to present The Shaman’s Face, a solo exhibition by the renowned conceptual artist Cang Xin. Having exhibited work across Europe and the Far East, this will be the artist’s debut solo exhibition in the United States. The Shaman’s Face is a continuation of Cang Xin’s recent approach to visually conceiving images of Shamanic interaction between the realms of Man and Nature, the material and the spiritual, and the individual in the collective.
Though born in Baotou, Mongloia, in 1967 Cang Xin was raised in Handan in Haibai Province. A student of music, literature, and philosophy it was after the 1989 student movement in Tiananmen Square that Cang Xin became committed to participating in the cultural reformation of Chinese society. In 1993 Cang Xin moved to Beijing’s “East Village” where, alongside fellow artists Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming, he began to create and collaborate on some of the earliest art actions of contemporary Chinese art, such as To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain.
In his most recent series, The Shaman’s Face, he has continued his departure from performance based art to reach into a visual world that the physical body is incapable of inhabiting, a world where the realms of nature, man, and spirit are bound up like threads in the rope of experience. And he has done so continuing to use his face as the primary visual symbol and conduit of expression. In these new works saplings sprout out of eyeballs and tongues, insects rest peacefully on the artist’s forehead, Cang Xin’s face is transplanted on to the shell of a snail, and in multiple instances the head is totally isolated from any body becoming a metaphorical representation of ritual and the human experience. These paintings reach into the supernatural, almost mythical, world of Shamanism, where a human face becomes the medium for the interconnecting energies of spiritual realms. --Charles M. Schultz
