Thread Portraits - The Truth That People Are Not Willing to Face

YEAR: 2006

MATERIAL: Thread, prints on silk screen, stainless steel frame

SIZE: 25 x 36 x 229 cm

VENUE EXHIBITED:

2010    Relatively Related, SZ Art Center, 798 Art District, Beijing, China

2007    Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, Museum of Art and Design, NY, USA

2006    Beyond the Duplicated Voice, Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia, USA

In this thread sculpture series,  I employed portraits of political and religious leaders at the center of global conflict at the time, such as Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Bush Jr, etc. In, The Truth That People Are Not Willing to Face, I paired George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. In, Can We Talk?, I paired Osama bin Laden and Pope John Paul II.

“Each work is made of two framed translucent scrim panels held apart by a steel armature at a distance of over six feet. Each of the two scrims, comprising one work, are printed or painted with a singular portrait. The large-scale simplified quality of the portraits reinforces the figures as icons of political or religious ideology; while the photographic images themselves, taken from the popular press, grounds them in the quotidian. Xiang hand-stitches the outline of the first figure with polychromatic thread; then, with exquisite control, draws each thread across the intervening space, binding it to the second figure. A vibrantly hued sculpted space is created, spanning the two figures.

Xiang sets up a dualistic relation between ideological opposites; then undermines a strict binary reading though the sculpture’s formal and material realization. His use of transparent scrims allows the viewer to see the two figures simultaneously. Viewed from either end, the distant figure is seen through the near figure. Yet there is no privileged viewpoint. The figure in the foreground, Bush or Saddam, depends on the vantage point of the viewer. The position of each portrait inverts as the viewer circles the work. The threading technique, used to sculpt the work, literally and figuratively binds the opposing figures into a heterogeneous whole.  ”

-- Mary Anne Friel, XIANG YANG: Dualities and Multiplicities, 2010