À corps perdus 2, 2018

Feng Kaixuan   Emerging artists

Kaixuan Feng's series "À corps perdus" (倾身) is a visual meditation on the contradictions of the human condition in the Anthropocene era. Through a hybrid process combining painting, performance, and photography, the artist constructs an iconography in which the body, both individual and universal, becomes the site of a symbolic collision between a nostalgia for the ideal and the brutality of reality.

The artist meticulously applies landscapes in Indian ink directly onto the skin, drawing inspiration from the shānshuǐ (“mountain-water") tradition that celebrates the immensity and serenity of timeless nature. This gesture, both ritualistic and performative, is then captured by the photographic lens, transforming this ephemeral work into a lasting relic. The addition of an atmospheric mist in the final image, a direct evocation of the “energy-breath" (qì) of classical painting, creates a semantic shift: this poetic vapor also serves as a disturbing echo of the industrial fog and toxic particles that invade our contemporary environments. The fog transforms into a commodified “Zen" imagery, an illusory consolation drawn from a fantasized ancient China. The painted body becomes a map of modern conflicts: it is the surface on which the stigmata of pollution are inscribed as much as the ardent desire for a natural and spiritual refuge.

Born in China and now evolving in the West, Kaixuan Feng questions the duality of the human, both “accomplice and victim" of the systems it engenders. Capitalism has always drawn man into a dominant relationship with nature, like a destructive passion, hypnotizing him in these contradictory illusions where the beautiful and the brutal appear peaceful.

"À corps perdu" (lost body), a French expression denoting total and unreserved commitment. The series raises issues of memory, temporality, and resilience with melancholic poetry. It invites the viewer to contemplate the fragile beauty of humanities lost in the fog, yet persevering despite everything, in a globalized landscape marked by ecological crisis and psychosocial perils. In this way, it offers an ethical and political reflection to question our relationship with the world.