Tureen is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by London-based artist Tommy Xie (b. 1998, Chaozhou, China). The works on view suggest a darker turn by the artist toward the far reaches of the queer psyche under duress and its refusal to either conform to or evade the forces responsible.
In Lee Edelman’s foundational queer theory polemic, No Future, he writes,
…[D]enying the appeal of fantasy, refusing the promise of futurity that mends each tear, however mean, in reality’s dress with threads of meaning (attached as they are to the eye-catching lure we might see as the sequins of sequence, which dazzle our vision by producing the constant illusion of consequence)—offers us fantasy turned inside out, the seams of its costume exposing reality’s seamlessness as mere seeming, the fraying knots that hold each sequin in place now usurping that place.
This fantasy, not the one in which we indulge ourselves but the collective one heaped on us unwittingly from birth, is dissolved by Xie in his newest body of work. As does the figure in the painting entitled Paper Doll, this collective fantasy gives way to the blackness of potentiality in that individual notion of fantasy—it is, in part, a rejection of the heterosocial contract in which the utility of pleasure is its perpetuation of the species in a wholesome and self-effacing march toward dawn. Theorist Amber Musser names a similar imagined place of queer rejection to Xie’s painted one “the shadow,” a place where disavowed desires and incoherent longings accumulate not in spite of but, rather, in exploration of the otherwise antisocial. In this zone, desire is not clean or legible; it is submerged, ambiguous, often destructive. Xie and Musser imbue with aesthetic meaning the transgressive experience of this desire so wholeheartedly rejected by collective futurism; theirs is a reclamation of the corruption that very futurism imposes on queer sensuality through its moralistic impulse. Dark and light, care and cruelty, pleasure and pain are freed from their imposed binaries in service of the queer self and all its rent.
The paintings on view in the exhibition mirror this shadowland in ways darker and more tense than much of the artist’s previous work. There is an equivocation in his figures’ expressions, a lack of certainty about their present negotiation between those binaries. What’s being done to them, by invitation or otherwise, demonstrates a willingness on Xie’s part to implicate his position as maker and that of viewer as participant in a most compromising way; the distance of objectivity typically afforded one looking at art is directly challenged. And the surroundings in which his subjects find themselves close in: the floorboards, the molding, the rug, the glass all serve as a proxy for the forces of submission they’re permitted to gratify. Even the pain we see inflicted, the droplet of blood drawn by a claw-like hand in Confusion 3, is not met by recoil. Rather, the loss of agency brings to bear a concomitant shedding of the inhibition born by those subjected to an oppressive cultural futurism.
Born in the city of Chaozhou, China, one of the most conservative in the country, Xie’s formative years were spent modeling a masculinity with submission as its foundation. Confucian familial hierarchies intersected with Chinese patriarchy in a pervasive environment of obedience, of fealty to the greater project. Queerness, for the artist, evinced no different a response to these environs. Unlike the stereotypically transgressive flamboyance often seen in Western queer experience, a kind of bastardized manifest destiny, Xie’s sexual expression receded inward in subjugation of the self, a more muted, compliant ideal. The figure in Chasing Game lies nude and prone across a traditional silk rug gripping the suited leg of an anonymous masculine presence. There is a suppliant quality to the body and its seeming vulnerability, its other hand precariously centered between two threatening black leather boots. The face belies a different sentiment—gaze unaverted, mouth slightly upturned, this figure lacks neither control nor satisfaction. To nestle in the shadow and embrace its duality provides a release from the confines of obedience to the collective ideal; theirs is a self-serving exploration of both sexual and emotional subservience.
The artist’s early navigation of these cultural underpinnings of family, sexuality, nationality found no nuance in their hegemony. For many years he understood them only as dogma, as a collective tool for repressing ambiguity; no joy could be had in wrong and no fault found in right. The more he began to center himself and his conception of desire in these narratives, the more at home he found himself in the interstices of certainty. The barbed brick wall in Risk presents for his figure not an obstacle but a respite, a chance to voluntarily indulge the kinds of strictures that once acted upon him sans agency.
Novelist Dennis Cooper has repeatedly mined this terrain in his work, and Xie’s admiration for the psychic architecture of Cooper’s narratives is felt deeply in these paintings. The unspoken, innate in the making of two dimensional artwork, pervades the writer’s conjuring of his oeuvre’s inhabitants. Both Xie and Cooper are drawn to characters whose inner worlds brim with unexpressed tension, their experience of violence not spectacle but quiet residue. The submission in which they linger is neither an end in itself nor an exercise in futility. It is generative, a surfacing of the affective damage and erotic inheritance from patriarchal structures. Like Musser’s shadow, these works make psychological room for contradiction. The cinematic universe in which Xie’s Confusion series seeks to limn such moments of epiphany illuminates the image of otherwise threatening physical contact through this chiaroscuro; there is an unmistakable nuance in the gestures and their result. These creators grant themselves permission to treat violence not simply as trauma but as a site of generative tension—something that can be felt fully and approached with courage.
At the extreme end of this blissfully nebulous spectrum is something the artist might call the warmth of the psychopath. This, perhaps the darkest of Xie’s calibrations, is a condition wrought by extreme violence when the lack in one’s emotional development is love rather than agency. Characters throughout Cooper’s work are acutely stricken with its insatiable, and ultimately dissatisfying, impulse for displaced yearning, their failings and others’ attempts to fill the void left behind reflected in the most harrowing work on view in the exhibition. In The Possession, we see a human-scaled terrarium in which rests a figure whose legs appear to have merged with the vessel’s landscape rendering them immobile, a look of placid concern (resignation?) on the face; there is no evidence of a struggle to escape these confines. Below, and partially obscured by the sandy bed of the vitrine, is coiled another figure somewhat vulnerable but undoubtedly in control; both are confined to the domestic interior that reappears throughout the exhibition. The knowing smile on the lower figure is evidence of that aforementioned warmth. An exploration of the shadow Xie exalts in other works here seems to have ended in more subjugation than discovery—the pendulum between the two in the artist’s world can swing to extremes. Yet the failure to find a substitute for love by one does not seem to presage the same destined failure for the other. There is no guarantee of redemption, only succor in the act itself. This is enough, Xie seems to say, and no matter the severity of the impulse or its end, this is fertile emotional ground for any who seek to reject the preordained futurism of queer self-denial. Even the body caged leaves the mind an infinite expanse against which to toil.
Tommy Xie (b. 1998 in Chaozhou, China) lives and works in London. He received a BFA at Central Saint Martins in London in 2021. He’s had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York, NY (2024), Ginny on Fredrick, London, UK, (2022) and Monti8, Latina, Italy, (2023). Selected group exhibitions include ‘Re:Representation’ at James Fuentes, organized by Amanda Ba, New York, NY (2024) and ‘Part of the Scenery’, Grove, London, UK (2023).
