“We have flowed out of ourselves / Beginning on the outside”
—Mina Loy, ‘The Dead’
Xie Lei’s Swallow is a prime example of the Chinese artist’s ability to consolidate palpable tension and ambiguity. Disarmingly intimate in its closely cropped format, the head and shoulders of a reclining male figure are here rendered with rapid, expressive brushstrokes that delicately build up the subject’s flesh tones against a background of deep, swirling colour. His features erased above the arch of his upper lip, the subject is anonymised, powerfully suggestive of the violence of death’s erasure of identity and the poetic confluence of internal and external forces as life leaves our bodies. The privileged status of the body as occupying a border line between life and death formed the focus of the group exhibition Mouthed Echoes mounted by Lyles & King, New York in 2022. Taking its title from Modernist poet and visual artist Mina Loy’s poem ‘The Dead’, the exhibition presented a sensitive meditation on this theme, with Xie Lei’s Swallow occupying a notably prominent position.
Xie Lei held the 2022 artist in residence position at the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels and has continued to exhibit in a range of group and solo shows, most recently at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the Kandlhofer in Vienna, and Lyles & King in New York all held earlier this year. Xie Lei’s works exude a poetic quietness which rests between tranquillity and distress, especially evident in the present work.
