Xie Chengxuan, born in Guangzhou in 1997, graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2020 and completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2023. 

He works primarily in acrylic and mixed media on canvases and papers. His  practice is grounded in deconstruction: objects are reduced to their  elementary visual units—points, lines, planes, colour blocks, textures— then reassembled. Because each viewer’s cultural and personal lexicon differs, the resulting images resist a single reading. The independent  elements continue to interact in the finished work, keeping the surface in  unresolved dialogue. 

The act of painting is digestion. Influences—political, social, intimate—are  taken in, broken apart, and reconstituted through repeated returns to the canvas. Each layer records a shift in thought; closure is refused. Prettiness  is avoided; the visible struggle is the point. 

Works by Xie Chengxuan are held by the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford),  Shanghai Outbound Museum, X Museum (Beijing), and private collections.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

Two kindergartens, three primary schools, two secondary schools. Guangzhou, Auckland, Hong Kong. Art degree at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. A year in South Carolina. Painting master’s at the Royal College of Art.

My mother was pregnant with my brother when the one-child rule said no. We left for Auckland with four suitcases, one way. In school there, older kids read to younger ones after lunch. My reader liked pop-up books—dinosaurs jumped, houses opened. I waited for that moment every day. When it was my turn to read, I gave the same book to a white boy. He looked at me and said to his friend, “It’s a Chinese.” I didn’t know the word then, couldn’t even write it. Later they sent us back to Guangzhou to learn.

Now I see I never belonged anywhere—and that is good. Flags do not touch me.

At university, Hong Kong burned. The biggest revolt ever. We shouted in the streets—Chinese or Hong Konger—but my New Zealand self fit neither side. I wanted truth, found only noise. In the end, I kept one thing: I am human. That is all.

Why paint? Every move killed friendships before they began. There was no one to talk to, so paint talked for me. Loneliness makes artists. It made me.

Moving taught me to drop ideas fast. Better ones came, I took them. My first real start was a summer in Chongqing: sketching with teachers, copying masters, drawing the model, learning to look.

Copying is not copying—it is living inside another man’s hand. To know Picasso, I must stand where he stood. Many fear influence and guard a small self. But the self is only what it steals; I steal from the best.

Why keep painting? Because things stolen must be digested. Painting digests. You watch me digest—that is the picture.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

Human nature. The phrase sounds empty, but I am sick of the post-Duchamp game of sticking clever labels on pictures. No human being is that simple, yet the world shoves us into tick-box lives. War news always comes in two slants; the only fact is that the slant shapes us.

Our job is to chew the slant and see what remains. That chewing is where human nature shows.

I wrestle on the canvas, and the scars of that wrestle become the picture. I look into war, then women’s rights, then children—more and more—but all are only carriers. I give no final verdict; I show the argument as the painting progresses. To paint war with planes and blood would be false—and an insult to the dead. The “human nature” I show is only mine.

Zen has taught me to be here, now. Walking meditation drops the destination; the walk itself is the point. In art, this means that the act of making must matter more than the finished thing. The process is the reflection on life.

Subjects? Private moments, public scandals, war, petty daily satire. Art must not float above life. Tied to life, it cannot repeat itself—human nature has too many faces.

How has your artistic style evolved over time?

From the start, I distrusted the factory routine: sketch, fill, texture, finish. A nude model, two minutes of line—that is the picture. Later tracing and colouring only prettify and kill the sense.

Modernism forced every canvas to answer: not what you paint, but why you paint so, and what the act means. I was once asked, “Why is painting called painting?” The word keeps the gerund even as a noun. The picture is still arguing with itself.

Line, plane, and colour do not cooperate—they talk. The canvas stays unresolved because it mirrors the argument in the room. We move from A to B to C; the subject may shift—no matter. You do not remember every day of your life, yet every day has made you. A stroke now answers everything that ever touched me. Months later, a new thought arrives; I repaint, and the picture turns.

This endless argument is closer to how people actually are—full of doubt, revision, and contradiction.

Bruce Lee broke something open for me. Early on, I sketched outdoors, then turned sketches into studio pieces—a ladder aiming at an imagined end. But combat is give and take; a planned routine is not art. I tried to smash the ladder: workshops, rubbings from stone and bark, answering outdoor textures indoors. Soon I saw that this caught only the skin of things.

Lee said a punch is the whole space answering back—even the bird on the branch. Later, answers came from culture, family, history. Studying Derrida’s deconstruction welded all these answers into what I do now.

Can you describe a recent project or artwork that you are particularly proud of?

Every canvas gets everything I have. Larger ones take longer, grow denser, but I am not proud of any.

Take Childrenland III as an example. It looks at what birth-planning did to women. “Did to” already turns them into objects; the shame goes on.

On the left side: women in a birthing machine. One head is a transferred image of Guanyin, the female Bodhisattva. Below, the date of the one-child rule—when second pregnancies were dragged to abortion. On the right: red characters quote the Chairman, now urging three children. My mother said it was too raw and asked me to destroy it. I painted crosses instead, letting some words bleed through—another mark of the argument.

The same local offices that once hauled women to abort now knock on doors begging for babies. On the top left are two men’s heads; on the right, a giant hand toasting them with a glass. At the centre stands a woman stepped out of the machine, glaring at us. Beneath her are ghosts of earlier paintings—old arguments showing through.

The five Childrenland canvases grew together, back and forth. They began with war, moved to a children’s hospital bombed in Ukraine, then to child welfare, and finally to women. One argument, still moving.

What role do you believe art plays in social and cultural change?

I stopped believing art can change society long ago. It may sting a few consciences or open a new window for some, but capital runs the show and art cannot touch it. We use art to ask where we fit in this machine.

Friends and I joke that artists are parasites. How many farmers, workers, and drivers must give their hours so one man who adds nothing to survival can smear paint—simply because he refuses to be a cog? The question is not what art changes, but why it is allowed a meaning bigger than bread.

Remember Eden: Adam and Eve were told not to eat the fruit. The serpent came, the bite, the sin. With free will, they were bound to eat sooner or later. God knew, yet gave the gift. Free will matters more than happiness. Painting on is the search for that bigger meaning.

Art may nudge culture a little, but only within the cage of politics and money. Tang poetry reached its peak when eighty percent of people were illiterate and poets were officials. Literacy had to wait until the Qing collapsed. Art history is the story of the few who had patrons. Their work echoed through centuries but barely brushed the lives of their own time. Art is not a lever for social engineering. Humanity is too tangled; art looks at the tangle, finding meaning or amusement.

How do you approach exhibiting your work? What are your goals when showing your art in public spaces?

A good picture must strike the viewer—make them think, make them gasp, but always bring them back to what it is to be human. The best place is the studio: mess, coffee rings, the fight in plain sight. Studios are pigsties, canvases block the light—impractical, yet the rawest truth lives there. Still, a solo show comes closest.

Many painters find a trick, repeat it, and call it style. One glance at an art fair and you know the hand: money, yes; surprise, no.

My view is simple—stop making pretty pictures. In Chinese we say “zhuo”: clumsy, unpolished. Strip ornament, strip polish. Prettiness smells of fear of the buyer’s eye. Raw marks come closer to the plain self, therefore to plain humanity.

Painters who freeze a manner turn factory. Drop the chase for beauty and the whole scaffolding of “style” wobbles. Ugliness is revolt; revolt is motion.

In public, I want people to see how I meet the world—chew it, spit it back. I want them to watch me wrestle on one canvas until they see a man and think of themselves. If someone leaves my show and says, “That fellow is worth knowing,” I have done my job.

Text & photo courtesy of Xie Chengxuan

Website: https://www.xiechengxuan.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artjx/

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Ticko Liu (b.1996) is a visual artist who has long focused on the intricate and delicate structures of the world. He excels at using surrealist painting to explore imagined nightscapes as well as the subtle poetry and fleeting beauty found in everyday experiences. His creative inspiration comes from a keen observation of nature, daily noise, and the sense of human existence. He is adept at transforming small and transient feelings into concrete images, guiding viewers to reflect on the harmony between private moments and the infinite in life.

Liu’s works blend oil painting with Eastern aesthetics. He believes that the meaning of existence comes from a sensitive appreciation of life, and he is dedicated to capturing those easily overlooked yet deeply enchanting moments on canvas—cultivating in viewers a greater appreciation for the subtle and profound connections that define the human experience.

Liu’s paintings have exhibitions at venues including Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (Berlin), Yuz Museum (Shanghai), Gallery Exit and Square street gallery. He has been shortlisted for both the 2025 Sovereign Asian Art Prize and the 2020 Hong Kong Human Rights Art Prize. His works are included in the Yuz Foundation collection and private collections across Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I use painting to explore the connections between all things and the essence of life, weaving an imaginative world with the visual vocabulary of both Eastern and Western art.

I pay special attention to those subtle and fleeting sensations around me, especially sounds. When I was a child, my family wouldn’t let me play video games, so I would secretly play when they weren’t home. Over time, I developed super hearing—I could tell when they were about to come back just by hearing the elevator doors open, and would immediately hide the game. As I grew older, I started to notice more subtle details in life, such as the flowers and plants by the roadside or chewing gum stains on the ground. These everyday observations gradually became sources of inspiration for my creations, and are reflected in works like “An archive of a hundred sparrows” and “Archive of a hundred sparrow”.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

Hong Kong is a place rich in material things, but emotionally repressed, especially after the social movements and the pandemic. It feels like we have entered an era where “there are many things we cannot say.” The changes over these five years have made me feel confused and pressured as I grew up. During the pandemic, I spent most of my time in front of the computer, doing things like browsing YouTube, watching movies, playing games, or even just staring blankly at the toys on my desk. Spending so much time zoning out is a form of repression, but this immersion in my own imagination has also become one of my sources of creative inspiration in recent years.

In 2020, I created a piece called “An archive of a hundred sparrows”. At first, I simply wanted to document the birds that had died in 2019, because during the protests, the police fired large amounts of tear gas, and usually within two or three days after a protest, there would be a lot of dead birds and insects on the streets. Sometimes there were so many that I wondered if there would be no sparrows left in Hong Kong. One day, on my way to work, I saw a flock of sparrows playing on the grass, and when they noticed me, they all flew away together. That moment, so full of vitality, is something I will probably never forget. I even thought it was such a blessing that there were still sparrows in Hong Kong. As for the dead birds, most of them would return to dust and earth. When I began creating “Hundred Birds” based on newspaper photos of dead birds, I also discovered the various ways birds die in Hong Kong—some were hit by trams, some crashed into the glass of tall buildings, their bodies mangled. As I worked, I started to abstract and blur the birds, moving from their intact forms to later stages where some had become like rocks or mountains. That piece became not only an awakening to the laws of nature for me, but also the moment I realized my art should strive to capture the fleeting beauty of life.

When society began to figure out how to arrange work during the pandemic, I started returning to work, a process that felt like reconnecting with society after a period of isolation. After spending so much time staring at screens, I began to prefer putting down my phone during my commute and really looking at the scenery I passed each day. It was a kind of yearning for nature. Over time, I started to recognize the shapes and locations of the wild grasses along the highway that I saw every day. With each daily glimpse, these impressions accumulated, and one day, the thought arose in my mind: why not try painting nature? At that time, I didn’t just want to paint flowers and plants, but rather to use constant, repeated observations to record the natural laws that govern people and the world through my work.

Later on, in another piece titled “Brick as a landscape 1”, there were no exhibitions for an entire year due to the pandemic. I was fortunate to still have a job, but the repetitive nature of the work inevitably became monotonous, and I strongly felt that the rest of my life could end up repeating like this every day. Sometimes, when I saw Lion Rock from Kowloon Tong Station, I felt a sense of irony—this Lion Rock Spirit that has always been emphasized, could it just be a kind of tedious repetition? At the same time, I noticed that the platform at Kowloon Tong Station was much dirtier than those at other stations. I saw water stains, chewing gum marks, and grime accumulating on the platform, all evidence of daily repetition. Water drops would fall onto the same spots, creating stains; chewing gum, stepped on by countless people day after day, formed solid marks on the ground. That was when I realized this grime was actually proof of labor—the traces left by Hongkongers going up and down the platform every day.

In the painting, there are obvious grids symbolizing the platform tiles, with a black mountain in the center. What I wanted to depict was the summit of Lion Rock. Firstly, I wasn’t interested in painting a landscape that everyone already had a fixed image of; secondly, I wanted the image to be a blurred impression—a very vague Lion Rock peak, or even just an indistinct mountain. This reflects how our definition of the so-called Lion Rock Spirit is actually very vague, and how we face an uncertain and unclear future became the core of this work. Some of the grid lines in the sky are abstract and distorted, just like how puddles on the ground refract the straight lines above; there are also colors on the mountain that don’t exist in nature, especially high-chroma purples—perhaps because everyone’s awareness of hygiene was heightened during the pandemic, and these bright, strange colors reminded me of bacteria under ultraviolet light.

Sometimes, I just hope for a space to escape, or to find a direction in which I can keep moving forward. So I often say to myself in my heart: “God, just point me to go somewhere”—and this is also reflected in the recurring motifs of the sun and moon in my works.

How has your artistic style evolved over time?

During my journey of learning art, Eastern aesthetics have had a profound influence on me. As a child, Japanese animation was often broadcast on Hong Kong television, so Japanese and Disney cartoons became the earliest forms of art I was exposed to. Later, when I was in university, I majored in oil painting. At the same time, in order to fulfill my credit requirements, I also started learning Chinese ink painting, using the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden as a reference for practicing rocks and trees. This experience made me realize that there is an essential difference between specimens and painting manuals: specimens emphasize recording unknown plants and animals in a scientific and objective way, while the Mustard Seed Garden Manual focuses more on the artist’s interpretation of the essence of the subject, embodying a cross-generational artistic dialogue and heritage. This difference between rationality/emotion and science/inspiration became an important foundation for my creative thinking.

These experiences sparked my interest in the arts of other regions in the East and led me to research the cultures of other places, such as ukiyo-e and Hokusai Manga. Ukiyo-e has always been a significant reference for both modern and contemporary art in my practice, especially in terms of color usage and spatial composition, both of which offer much to learn from. Through this process, I began trying to break free from the limitations of ink painting, hoping to bring the spirit and brushwork of ink into my own oil painting practice.

Ukiyo-e has had a profound impact on my artistic practice. Firstly, in terms of visual language, ukiyo-e emphasizes flat compositions and the use of bold color blocks. This has made me pay more attention to the structure of the image and the coordination of colors in my own work, rather than simply pursuing realistic three-dimensionality. Secondly, ukiyo-e’s approach to space—such as the use of negative space, shifts in perspective, and the arrangement of visual layers—has inspired me to consider how to express complex ideas through simple means, allowing viewers to experience an infinite sense of imagination within a limited frame.

Moreover, the subjects of ukiyo-e often come from everyday life and natural scenery. This has prompted me to reflect on my own creative content, encouraging me to discover subtle feelings within ordinary things. The spirit of inheritance and reinvention in ukiyo-e has also helped me find connections between tradition and modernity, teaching me how to blend different cultures and techniques to form my own style. Overall, ukiyo-e is not just a technical reference for me—it has also brought new breakthroughs to my creative mindset and perspective.

In my works, you can see elements such as Eastern perspective, the spatial segmentation of garden doorways, and the assembly of everyday fragments into imaginative spaces. In today’s fragmented era, information flows rapidly online in the form of reels and short videos. People are constantly surrounded by sensory stimulation, gradually becoming numb to the content itself, making it difficult to think deeply or truly feel. This phenomenon of diluted attention and scattered, fragmented thoughts is also reflected in my art—I cut and reassemble everyday details on the canvas, continually reflecting on the meaning of each fleeting moment. For me, this creative process is both a way to explore the connections between all things and a path to pursue the essence of life and art.

How do you approach exhibiting your work? What are your goals when showing your art in public spaces?

When planning the exhibition of my works, I place great importance on letting the artworks speak for themselves. Therefore, in the layout of the exhibition space, I try to give each painting more space, allowing viewers to focus on and appreciate the details of every piece. Each work contains many delicate elements that require the audience to take their time to experience. After setting up the exhibition, I also like to place a smaller painting next to a larger one, using the contrast in size to echo the theme of “fragmentation.” This arrangement not only highlights the resonance between the works, but also allows viewers to perceive the messages conveyed by the paintings from different perspectives.

How do you balance artistic integrity with commercial considerations, if applicable?

When it comes to balancing artistic integrity with commercial considerations, I believe the best way is not to balance them at all, but rather to insist on doing the work well. In every collaboration or creative process, I consider reputation, resources, and smooth cooperation as the three main factors. As long as two of these aspects can be achieved, I think the collaboration is worthwhile. To achieve the ideal result, I once worked on a brand collaboration where I revised and adjusted the design many times, ultimately producing 20 different versions before making a final selection. That was one of the happiest collaborations I’ve experienced, because both parties wanted to present the best possible work.

Whether it is art or business, the ultimate goal should always be to deliver the best outcome.

To me, these three aspects are actually interconnected and it’s difficult to separate which is the most important. If I must choose, I believe “smooth cooperation” is the most crucial. Only with a foundation of smooth collaboration can we build long-term partnerships, which in turn bring more resources and enhance personal reputation. A good collaborative experience not only leads to high-quality work, but also creates more opportunities for future cooperation. Therefore, I believe smooth cooperation is the core that drives everything forward.

Can you describe a recent project or artwork that you are particularly proud of?

A recent work that I am particularly proud of is my solo exhibition“Ephemera,” held at Gallery Exit. This exhibition is especially meaningful to me because everything I believe in and strive for began to converge and take shape here.

During the creative process, I often reflect on how the world intricately weaves harmony and interconnectedness. When I paint, my mind is always filled with questions of “why” and “what if”; I see my art as a continuous pursuit of these questions.

Text & photo courtesy of Ticko Liu

Website: https://www.tickoliu.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ticko.liu/