Xie Fan

Marguo is thrilled to present In Between, a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Xie Fan, organised in collaboration with Maison Ming. Unfolding within a historic shophouse in Hong Kong’s Tai Hang neighbourhood, the exhibition offers a site-specific meditation on the nature of light, materiality, and the urban rhythm of Hong Kong.

Within the historic architecture of a traditional Tai Hang shophouse in Hong Kong, the very name of Maison Ming serves as a compass. “Ming” or 明 in Chinese — formed by the union of the sun (日) and the moon (月) — becomes the conceptual starting point of Xie Fan’s exhibition. The works unfold around four thematic constellations — Sun, Moon, Flame, and Sea — tracing the cyclical movement of the sun and the moon. Here, light is no longer a static backdrop, but a shifting condition: moving through the textures of the old building, receding and quietly returning, mirroring the passage of time within the narrow and vertical volumes of the space.

Beginning with Xie Fan's iconic Celestial Signs series — an ancient code suspended overhead, the artist recalls the stars that have long functioned as humanity’s earliest clocks. Within this rhythm, the Moon appears not as a source of light, but as a mediator and echo of the Sun — a trace left behind as light withdraws, the very shadow of time.

In the Golden Sea series, Xie Fan's interweaving of gold leaf and oil paint renders the water’s surface into a highly light-sensitive metallic skin — a breathing plane that carries the movement of the sky and reflects it back into the intimate interiors of the Maison Ming.

Yet this pursuit of light and material does not remain in the past. For Xie Fan, Hong Kong itself is another vast “skin.” Sunlight and moonlight settle upon it daily — across building facades, streets, and zebra crossings — transforming into staggered footsteps and fleeting fragments of bodies in motion. The celestial cycle touches the asphalt; the scale shifts from the cosmic to the lived. The image moves from the sky to the street, from eternal recurrence to the immediacy of everyday life.

As one moves through the space of Maison Ming, the gold leaf in the paintings flickers in response to the light drifting in from Tai Hang’s streets. Cosmic time and urban rhythm overlap in this moment. “Ming” thus signifies both distant starlight and the illumination of the present second unfolding beneath our feet.

As the gaze descends from the cosmic to the human, the Flame series introduces a different radiance: the light created in the face of darkness. By painting on terracotta panels—surfaces shaped by earth and fire—Xie Fan returns to the earliest material conditions of image-making. Here, the work is inseparable from the physical gesture and the mineral surface; painting is no longer mere representation, but a direct engagement with matter itself.

Xie Fan (b. 1983, Jiangyou, Sichuan Province, China) is a contemporary Chinese artist who re-examines the material essence of painting and the way images interact with light, surface and time. Having begun his practice with oil painting on silk, the artist used translucent fabric to investigate how light, color and the viewer’s perception interact. Over time his focus shifted toward more elemental supports, leading him into long-term material research on clay and terracotta. Rather than using traditional canvas, Xie Fan applies layers of mineral pigments and oxides onto raw clay surfaces and then fires them at high temperatures, allowing chemical transformations in the kiln to become part of the work’s visual language. This method foregrounds chance, memory and the physicality of matter itself, forging a dialogue between painting, craft and sculpture.

Xie Fan received his BFA from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (SFAI) in 2005. Recent solo exhibitions include Painting as Event, Bangkok Kunsthalle (Bangkok, Thailand); Various Fires, Académie Conti (Vosne-Romanée, France, 2024); Dionysus‘s Screen, Galerie Marguo (Paris, France, 2023); Sediment, Sifang Art Museum, Tongren Road Space (Shanghai, China, 2022); Back To The Footlights Tomorrow, White Space Beijing (Beijing, China, 2014). Xie Fan currently lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu.