Bangkok Kunsthalle, March 29 – 31, 2025
Xie Fan’s artistic practice is deeply engaged with the temporal and material conditions of painting. Operating at the intersection of painting, ceramics, and performance, his work resists conventional categorization, instead positioning itself as an event—something that unfolds in time, is shaped by environmental contingencies, and is ultimately ephemeral.
Taking place over three days, ‘Painting as Event: Materiality and Light in the practice of Xie Fan’ merges the artist’s painting practice with performative and communal elements. By framing the exhibition as a three-day event, Xie Fan foregrounds the performative dimension of his practice. During the day, limited servings of the artist’s signature mapo tofu will be sold, while each evening, the artist will prepare and serve a full-course meal using ceramic vessels he has crafted—situating his work within a broader discourse of materiality, ritual, and impermanence.
Central to the exhibition are dozens of small-scale terracotta paintings and monumental sponge pigment paintings that span the stairwell and third floor of the Kunsthalle building. For Xie Fan, the act of painting is a study of permeation—how pigment enters, settles, and interacts with its support. As he describes: “Permeation is at the core of all painting traces. In Eastern painting, there is a saying: ‘the force penetrates the paper’s back,’ meaning that brushstrokes and ink seep through the paper, reaching its essence. Therefore, to master the principle and rules of permeation is to find the essence of painting." Xie Fan challenges the notion of painting as a controlled, static composition; instead, he approaches it as a negotiation between material properties, environmental forces, and the artist’s interventions.
Xie Fan’s paintings on sponge are the culmination of the artist’s study of permeation and palimpsest. Pigment, distilled from red earth from Khao Yai Art Forest, is layered on top of flora indigenous to Khao Yai, leaving stratified shadows of leaves and plants embedded into the surface. Here, the layering of pigment echoes the accumulated strata of cultural memory and history that constitute human civilization. Sponge, like terracotta, is a material that absorbs and releases, retaining traces of its environment while resisting fixity. In this sense, Xie Fan’s work aligns with contemporary discourses in painting that emphasize process, material agency, and the instability of the image.
This material specificity extends into the way the paintings are perceived. During the day, they are illuminated by natural daylight, revealing the nuanced textures and tonal shifts embedded in the terracotta. As the sun moves across the space, so too do the paintings evolve, responding to the fluctuating conditions of light and shadow. In the evening, this experience becomes even more personal: each visitor will be given a candle, invited to navigate the exhibition space and encounter the works in an intimate, shifting dialogue between light, surface, and perception. The paintings do not simply constitute an event, but are events themselves—activated by their surroundings, responsive to time and space.
‘Painting as Event’ challenges the notion of painting as a stable, autonomous object. Instead, it invites the audience into an experience where perception is fluid, where artworks are contingent upon their environment, and where material and ritual merge to form a sensorial and communal event. Through the interplay of gastronomy, ceramics, painting, and light, Xie Fan reminds us that art is not something we merely observe but something we inhabit. It asks us to be present, to embrace the moment, and to recognize that beauty—like a meal or the glow of a candle, it is most powerful when it is fleeting.
By Stefano Rabolli Pansera
