“Art is why I get up in the morning,” the musician Ani DiFranco proclaimed in the song Out of Habit, which starts with butter melting on cold toast out of habit. Ever since my 20s, I’ve held this mantra close – there really have been many mornings when art was the only reason I got out of bed.
A recent example is the artist Lantian Xie, currently at Grey Noise gallery in Dubai. In the gallery space: one coloured-pencil drawing of the Chicago Hotel tacked on a wall. One wall painted green. One ashtray on the floor. Speakers playing Tagalog on a continuous loop. Two 1950s prints of pheasants. Five dirty styrofoam cups on the floor. And what would become my favourite part: a young Asian man dancing around his bathroom in his pyjamas. My normal gallery behaviour is to ask few questions and figure it out for myself, but in this case, I was so completely lost, I had no choice but to query the docent.
The artist, who lists hotel lobbies among his foremost interests, grew up in Garhoud, and the minimalist assembly of objects, sounds and images on display are his assembled memories from childhood. Together, they represent a sense of waiting and of looking in from the outside. The music he was dancing to, I was told by the docent, is what the chain restaurant Hardee’s plays when it puts you on hold, and the dancing man is what the artist fancies himself doing while he’s waiting on the phone. The underlying playfulness of the artist’s choices came as a refreshing blast in a room that appeared so sombre at first glance.
Original article by Tej Rae
Continue reading at The National:
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