I dagars första timmar kan medvetandet omfattar världen
som handen gripa en solvarm sten

　　- Thomas Tranströmer 


　　In the first ray of daylight, consciousness catches the world

　　Like a hand catches a warm stone under the sun

　　- Thomas Tranströmer (Swedish poet)

　　Pan Xi paints women’s bodies with fluid, water-based colour on Chinese silk. Each painting represents one woman. She paints them from their sides and their backs, their sensual breasts and rosy nipples exposed to us from behind open shirts. Their body gestures, caught by the transparency of Chinese silk, are immaculate. They are dressed and yet undressed. Pan Xi paints beautiful clothes for them—gold and white lace in elegant patterns. Sometimes the lace is tight, as if part of the skin, revealing more than concealing the body. Sometimes it falls in the background like extravagant drapery, expanding the space of the subject. The women sink in their own worlds, not responding to whoever gazes at them - from whatever direction. They are self-contained, alone but not lonely. The smooth and fast drawn lines that embrace their bodies remind one of the endless images of women in action in Degas’ world, but the purity within their bodies marks their existence as significantly different from the steamy hot Paris brothels. Nevertheless, the seduction embodied in their gestures and actions is both sophisticated and sexy.

　　The women in Pan Xi’s paintings are also submerged in colourful and complicated backgrounds; backgrounds so well painted that sometimes they overtake the simplicity of the woman’s couture and become an extended second skin. We see golden lace with intricate patterns floating between a woman’s body and the night-blue ,dark background. Crimson drops, as red as the woman’s nail colour, spread all over on a white background in a seemingly casual manner. Pan Xi pays strong attention to creating such backgrounds. They are like the colouristic summons in Matisse’s paintings, causing our eyes to spin and engaging our full visual attention in what he called an experience of “aesthetic blinding”. [1] The women in Pan Xi’s paintings often have their faces obscured or hidden; however, we sense their self-indulgence in a very pleasant manner precisely by merging our viewing of the women with the complex backgrounds that surround them. As a great admirer of Matisse, Pan Xi tries to modulate her master’s skills with her female sensitivity. Her paintings stir up our visual experience more delicately than the great master.

　　With water-based pigment on water-absorbing Chinese silk, there is already unpredictable spontaneity in the process of painting, but Pan Xi has more logical thinking behind each composition and each colour combination in her paintings. She received her professional artist training in Russia twenty years ago when the old-schooled academic guideline was still dominated by a more austere tradition. Perhaps the Western art training also helped to build up the rational way of thinking in her creative process. She sees this logic in the very material that she loves, namely, the lace. “You know why I am so fascinated by the lace?’ she asks. “Except for its female delicate characteristic, I am more attracted by the repetitive intertwined patterns that show so much rationality behind its disorder and complicity. I love such complicated logic: underneath each act of spontaneity, there is always logic.” [2]

　　The women in Pan Xi’s paintings are surrounded by a warm and intimate environment just as the artist is. They enjoy the total freedom to be themselves in their private space. Pan Xi does not use models. She painted the women that have always existed in her own mind with confidence and self-contentment. She exists with them in their aloneness and in their day-dreaming. Their state of mind eventually is hers. In this classical keyhole setting of the images, we watch these women staring at their own image in the mirror, their hands moving across their own bodies and their fingers twisting in their hair. We are the voyeurs utterly enjoying what we see.

　　Twenty years ago, Pan Xi followed the Russian master of monumental murals, Professor V. N. Chelombiev, to study mural painting. She had to approach art from the very essence of art making; with a heavy hammer in her hand, she learned to make perfect mosaic out of rocks from the Ural mountains. Those very delicate hands of hers would feel much more at home when she came across a piece of Chinese silk on her father’s painting desk two years ago. Pan Xi’s father paints traditional landscape paintings with ink on rice paper. Silk is the material used to mount the fragile rice paper. When she touched the soft silks, she immediately wondered how it would be to paint on them. Her professionalism, based on the study of oil painting, allowed her to imagine how paintings on silk would look when stretched and mounted on frames. It was a successful experiment; one that offered her a new starting point in her artistic pursuit.

　　Pan Xi feels the freedom of dropping colour on the water-absorbing silk, and she controls such spontaneity with her refined logic. She designed the transparent acrylic glass frames in which to install her paintings. When light moves through the clear frame and passes by the silk painting, the interplay between the light, the shadow and the colour on the silk all become integral parts of the whole aesthetic experience. In the manner of a classic Chinese poem: like layers of ice-white silk cut into countless pieces, [3] the metaphor of silk written by the poet emperor of the Song Dynasty brings psychological calmness and sentimentality.

　　She chooses to be beautiful and she chooses to be sexy; she chooses to make her art the same. This is the very confidant attitude towards life of a mature, Chinese female artist in our contemporary Chinese society.

　　by Kaimei Olsson Wang

　　About the writer: Kaimei Olsson Wang is an independent art writer and curator. She has a MA on contemporary art in the Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She has lived near the North Pole for many years before she relocated to the equator for a change. She lives with her family in Shanghai now.

　　[1] Matisse used the notion of “aesthetic of blinding” in response to critiques of his style of swirling background and figures in a blurred and blinded experience. See “Art Since 1900” Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss and more, 2004, Thames& Hudson, P101

　　[2] Email communication between the writer and Pan Xi, 14th , March, 2011.

　　[3] From Zhao Jie, last emperor of Song Dynasty“ Yanshan Pavilion, En route to the north encountering apricot blossoms”