ZURICH.- Galerie Urs Meile is presenting Xie Nanxing: Fugitive Figuration. Paintings 1994–2026, a solo exhibition curated by Clémentine Deliss at the gallery’s Zurich Ankerstrasse space. The exhibition opened on Friday, June 12, and remains on view through August 29, 2026.

Bringing together nine paintings from six different series, the exhibition traces more than three decades of Xie Nanxing’s practice, from his defining works of the 1990s to paintings completed in 2026. Shown together for the first time, the works offer both an introduction to and a reassessment of the artist’s singular position within contemporary Chinese and international painting.



At the heart of the exhibition is the idea of figuration as something unstable, elusive and psychologically charged. Xie’s paintings do not simply depict visible reality. Instead, they open up scenes that seem suspended between memory, performance, dream and unease. His figures often appear only partially, sometimes hidden in plain sight, inviting the viewer to enter a space where recognition and uncertainty unfold at the same time.

Although Xie does not work with time-based media, his paintings often feel cinematic. Their scenes suggest fragments of a larger narrative, drawing viewers into atmospheres filled with tension, ambiguity, humor and occasionally suppressed violence. This filmic quality is particularly present in Untitled, No. 6 from 2003, the last work in a significant series in which Xie painted members of his family, including himself, lying on the floor of his studio. In some works from the series, however, no body appears at all. What remains is a charged emptiness, as if figuration has dissolved or escaped.





The exhibition places these earlier works in dialogue with recent paintings such as Portrait of an Equal Sign, No. 3 from 2026. In this work, a semi-undressed figure — the artist himself — appears in a strange encounter with a second, headless self, while a female mannequin stands nearby in a tailored suit. The scene mixes art historical references, theatrical staging and visual wit, evoking everything from nineteenth-century French painting to Japanese tiger imagery, Victorian interiors and the language of the art market.

Xie’s paintings often operate through this kind of collision. The environment merges with the figure; the personal becomes theatrical; the familiar becomes unsettling. His work can be romantic and humorous, but also sharp, uncomfortable and deliberately unresolved. In Untitled, No. 8 from 2025, motorcycle riders rush through green undergrowth somewhere near Beijing, suggesting movement, concealment and the unstable visibility of contemporary life.

Placed side by side, works from 1994 and 2026 reveal how certain questions have remained central to Xie’s practice. How does a painter search for a subject? How does an artist work from the perspective of an inner eye? In Portrait of an Equal Sign, No. 4 from 2026, a blood-red exclamation mark interrupts the canvas, suggesting that this renewed self-examination has become urgent. Skeletal figures, first seen in the 1990s, return in these recent works, naked and defiant, disturbing the order of the scene below.

Born in Chongqing in 1970, Xie studied printmaking, a background that continues to shape his approach to pigment, surface and transfer. In works such as Mug Mat from 2011, he paints onto loosely woven cloth attached to a canvas, then removes the fabric, leaving behind traces of pigment that create a ghostly, layered image. In Untitled, No. 1 from 2024, he uses another indirect process, projecting light through an oil sketch attached to the back of the canvas, photographing the resulting image, transferring it digitally and then using it as the basis for a painting. Both the finished work and its prototype are included in the exhibition.

This attention to process gives Xie’s paintings their distinctive sense of movement and uncertainty. Images seem to appear and disappear before the eye. Colors cling to the surface, are obscured, layered and reworked, until something unexpected emerges. The works reward slow looking. They ask viewers to sit with them, to follow their shifts in subject and space, and to allow meaning to form gradually.

Xie Nanxing is widely recognized as a key figure in contemporary painting from China. He first gained international attention at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, where he presented quasi-photorealist self-portraits and male nudes marked by vulnerability and psychological intensity. In the early 2000s, he began working from blurred photographs and mediated images, moving toward abstraction. Three works from this period were shown at Documenta 12 in 2007.

Since then, Xie has continued to challenge the conventions of painting through experimentation with image, surface, gesture and time. His works resist fixed interpretation, allowing forms to hover between abstraction and figuration, recognition and disappearance. He lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu.

Institutional solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Pingshan Art Museum in Shenzhen, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Kunstverein Hamburger Bahnhof in Hamburg and Manchester Art Gallery in the United Kingdom. His works are held in major public and private collections internationally, including the De Ying Foundation, Goetz Collection, K11 Collection, New Century Art Foundation, Novartis Collection, Rachofsky Collection and M+ Sigg Collection.

Curator Clémentine Deliss works across contemporary art, curatorial practice and publishing. She is currently Curator at Large at KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels, where she is preparing Département des Pièges for the museum’s opening in November 2026. She is also KANAL-Guest Professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and Global Humanities Professor of History of Art at the University of Cambridge.

With Fugitive Figuration, Galerie Urs Meile presents Xie Nanxing as a painter of ambiguity, transformation and restless visual intelligence. Across works made between 1994 and 2026, the exhibition reveals a practice in which figuration is never stable, but always in motion — escaping, returning and reappearing in new and unexpected forms.