Installation view “Xie Hongdong: The Third Compass” at ENGAGE Projects/Courtesy of ENGAGE Projects
Imagine, if you will, a young boy growing up in Gansu province, a poor northwest region of China, in a home where the whole family sleeps on a single mat on the floor. One day, someone gives the boy a camera and he escapes into the world of nature, into the land of images… Xie Hongdong, now living and working in Beijing, was that boy. He is self-taught and has a strict rule of never altering the photographs once he’s clicked the shutter. The work in this exhibition is simply presented—matte images mounted to float mere millimeters from the wall.
Xie Hongdong, “The Third Compass 08” (detail)/Courtesy of ENGAGE Projects
His early smoke images are lovely, but it is the newer. more cerebral work that engages me. Hongdong returns to his home several times a year to make new work.
“Every time I go, I see new things with new eyes—the land and skies, streams and weather are always the same, and always different, full of mystery that leads me to new and uncharted worlds,” he says. One can sense the deepening of what he calls a blood connection to his home as the work has grown and matured. The work has also become stronger as he has gained confidence in his process.
Xie Hongdong, “The Third Compass 08”/Courtesy of ENGAGE Projects
In the 2023 piece, “The Third Compass 08,” that gives the show its title, Hongdong reaches deep into the world of macro nature. The image is of ice, tinted green by algae that lives in the water. Shards move in multiple directions, contributing dynamism and life. Printed to slightly over fifty-two-by-seventy-eight inches, softness and grain give the piece a poetic essence, drawing the viewer in. Once the subject is known, it becomes even more fascinating.
Xie Hongdong “The Flaming 03”/Courtesy of ENGAGE Projects
A second piece, titled “The Flaming 03,” from 2022, intrigued me even before I knew the backstory. It’s a wonderful abstraction, filled with movement in multiple directions, wheat-colored slashes on a deep black ground, which it turns out is a blackboard. Where Hongdong comes from in China, it is forbidden to write any religious text. In this case, he wrote the text on the blackboard, and then hurriedly erased it, leaving the smears and smudges that cover the surface of this image. It is that depth of storytelling that make these far more than the abstracts they appear to be at first glance. Hongdong is, above all, a storyteller. His abstract images are visually beautiful compositions, filled with subtlety and delicate texture, but it is the stories behind them, the story of that boy with a camera, that transcends the label of simple photography, carrying the viewer to China, and deeply into the natural world that so inspires the artist.
“Xie Hongdong: The Third Compass” at Engage Projects, 864 North Ashland, on view through July 8.
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