SHAFEI XIA

On Wednesday 1st December 2020, P420² presented a solo exhibition by Shafei Xia (ShaoXing, China, 1989) titled Welcome to my show, which contains a new cycle of works – eight in all – specifically made for the occasion, painted on sandalwood paper with canvas backing.

Just two months before the exhibition, Shafei completed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, with a thesis titled The World is the Circus, paraphrasing a well-known remark of Federico Fellini. The cradle of all forms of entertainment, capable of eliciting peals of laughter and deep emotional engagement, of flooding huge tents with light or plunging them into pitch darkness, the circus is the metaphor of life, “perhaps simply its abbreviation,” the artist writes, adding that it “is a marvelous memory of childhood, and a marvelous fantasy of adulthood.”

“The main theme of her works is love,” Maura Pozzati indicates in an essay written as an introduction to the artist, “experienced as desire, jealousy and violence, represented explicitly or symbolically, depending on the case, but nevertheless omnipresent.” Hence Shafei’s circus is inhabited by a myriad of figures, undressed acrobats, lovers making love, tigers, cheetahs and animals of all kinds. All this is narrated without ever losing the delicate treatment of the faces, of the depiction of settings, the description of nude bodies, movements and poses.