ASSOLO #1

Francesca Antonini Arte Contmporanea is pleased to introduce the first appointment of the Assolo cycle, dedicated to Chinese painter Shafei Xia (ShaoXing, 1989). Starting with this exhibition, the gallery will present a project involving a guest artist every six months. Artists will be assigned the central room, where they will be able to freely intervene with an accurate selection of new works. For Assolo #1 Shafei Xia has created a body of six watercolors on sandal paper mounted on canvas, in which the staged universe brims with characters and events nimatead by eros, desire and hedonism. Narrative  devices are reminiscent of classic fables and man-animal metamorphosis - archetypical characters, relations and rites of passage - as well as medieval fabliaux. These salacious tales, joyfully obscene, give life to a sort of animal epic, which blends ideas and traits from the oriental pictorial tradition, popular legends, irony and above all a tangible joy of life. The scenery of each painting is dreamlike, and boundaries between good and evil, desire and danger, love and violence are extremely blurred and permeable, as the ambiguous nature of every human drive. Thus Shafei Xia tells crowded and lively stories, which tell of lovers proud of their nudity and their amorous impulses, musicians in concert, ferocious beasts that threaten young girls, equilibrists who whirl with enthusiasm. Among the recurring elements is the fascination for the circus, with its inextricable weave of glitter and sadness, and Fellini’s atmospheres, who himself drew abundantly from the same imaginary. Food and drink insert themselves like small still life frames, playing on the layering of pleasures of the flesh and tying together erotic appetites and gourmandise. Shafei Xia's brush runs on sandal paper with oriental precision and fluidity, lightly sketching the bodies and objects. The turbulence of instincts and passions are therefore tempered by an abundant dose of humor and love for sugary tones of watercolors and glitters.
Shafei Xia was born in ShaoXing in China in 1989. After earning her bachelor's degree in scenography at ChongQing University in 2013, she moves to Shanghai. Later on she moved to Bologna, where, in 2020, she graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 2019 she won the Zucchelli Foundation Talent Prize (for talent ) for Art. Her most recent solo shows include Principessa Shafei, Antonini Milano, Palazzo Borromeo, Milan (2020), We live in the world, Lunetta11, Mombarcaro (2020), Welcome to my show, P420 - Project Room, Bologna (2020), Decadent gaming, Linseed, Shanghai, CH (2020).