Building the Body Archives
By Ouksi (writer, astrologer)
Xavier Wei, alias Baobao, loves the human body, especially the body sculptured by time and gravity. From the very beginning of his career, he is fascinated by the possibilities of the body. He is an archivist before a painter, because he is building a Body Archives.
His work is above all portraiture. The subjects are mostly his friends, occasionally strangers he met on the street and who would later become his friends as well. To be honest, the productivity of the archivist consumes a lot of models, but fortunately, they can be recycled too. These amiable figures on canvas, some wrapped in cloth, some half-stripped, some completely leafless, seem to be quite comfortable with their nudity, not without a cheeky playfulness. The exhibitionism is reckless but childishly spontaneous as if they just had a wonderful time with bottles of wine…
Baobao loves gossip, but he doesn’t gossip about his friends. He accepts them as they are, in reality as in painting. Not because he is a good man, but because he is so obsessed with his own vision that he has no time being judgmental.
Most impressive is his anatomy. The body seems to be twisted by some unknown force, almost à la caricature, but it works marvelously in this grotesque garden. He never wants to disfigure his people; he just contorts them slightly with different physical conditions in order to extract their quintessential characteristics. So the body can float above the ground, stand in the water, or sit in the air, and its parts are always flexible and malleable. These humanoids are sketches of unpredictable human conditions.
This is a graceful freak show, which mirrors our freakiness in daily life.
There is a curious massiveness in his composition: The muscle is sinewy; the skin is callous; the body is well kneaded by carnal pleasure and suffering; the facial expression is naive but sophisticated as though enlightenment is just another trivial endeavor. Interestingly, his women look masculine and robust like the Amazons in Stone Age, and his beefy men are extremely sensual and vulnerable, which gives the pictures a homoerotic undertone. The sexual value is high. The dialectic of anima and animus generates a unique and inherent tension on the tableau.
However, eroticism is not his main interest; he is more ambitious than that. His clan is not neutral nor asexual, but hermaphrodite, even multisexual. As an archivist, he has to collect all the facts about the human body, analyze and classify them, and then produce more new possibilities from what he has. Especially significant are his two highly acclaimed small-format series, Saint Sébastian and Salle de Bain, where brutality and tenderness, torture and caress, eroticism and chastity, coquettishness and spontaneity… are all interchangeable. This is the world of Greek gods. Sexuality is multiplied, eroticism is normalized, gender is transcended, and human being is ready to mutate towards the next evolution.
Painting is a sensual thing, and our painter never eschews his sensuality and sensitivity. He is a heavy user of Facebook. If you befriend him, you can easily click ‘like’ 10 times a day and then question the meaning of your life. He is constantly posting: the coffee he drinks, the biscuits he has, ads on buses, exhibition posters, people in metro, happy birthday to Catherine Deneuve, Sophia Loren smiling, naked fish on market stand, balsamic moon in the sky, shadow of trees on the wall, the inventive dishes he cooks, and a pile of grimacing selfies…
Baobao likes to entertain his folk, in particular himself. He is narcissistic for sure, just like anyone of us, but he is not ashamed of it. This is real narcissism. He is not ashamed of the body, of the adoration for body. His one and the only hero is Michelangelo. This is an ace.
Before the age of Facebook, he blogged, he took pictures, he made collage out of newspapers and magazines, and he sent his woodcut pieces to his friends as Happy New Year cards. These are his daily training programs. He is a workaholic, but a happy one. It’s no problem for him to paint 10 hours a day and everyday.
Jealous? Don’t be, unless you are a Capricorn with Aries Rising like him.
This is probably the strongest combination of courage and willpower: Aries provides the momentum for action and Capricorn perseverance and stability. The Saturnian force of Capricorn is a coercive, almost karmic drive, which manifests superbly in his productivity and fascination for massiveness. Plus, his Sagittarius Moon cannot thrive without total freedom and expansion. That means subconsciously, he is always longing for more, and this is the genuine virtue of an archivist.
The flower blooming here and there in his painting is a good example. This is a small but incredibly tenacious motif, which pops out as crown, on the cloth, in the garden, on the wall, at the fingertips… He is a flower lover, and once he loves something, he won’t love it lightly. The flower becomes a flower fetish. No matter how many meanings you have found for the flower, the flower fetish will generate more meanings to escape your interpretation. The reason for that is because fetishism doesn’t work only in the symbolic level, but in all the possible levels if necessary.
Fetishism is the mechanism that discovers the specific magic of a certain object, and then evokes this magic whenever the desire strikes. If you can manipulate fetishism instead of being manipulated by it, you can create a whole new reality. This is how art works. An archivist always knows how to isolate the magic of things, make it a category, and let it be a highly identifiable feature of his work. And the style is born.
The Body Archives is never one-dimensional; it is a complicated organic system composed of files of different levels and categories. First there are basic data-files such as typology, morphology, and anatomy of body parts. Through a mix-and-match process we could then have, for example, a body file called Julian. This file would soon develop its own genealogy. (Julian painted in 1995, 2002, 2013 etc.) Furthermore, it could be refined by topological categories: How has the body changed through time? What is its relation to the background in every picture? Is Julian alone, in duo, or in a group?
When the Body Archives is built, we won’t bother anymore to judge the bodies, to make this nose prettier or that breast sexier. Since every body is one singularity, a simplistic judgment of beauty loses its ground. When we enter the Body Archives, those bodies will automatically become our own physical extensions and possibilities. You can find in them your own emotions, desires, and spirituality. And if you want, you can make anyone of them a shrine of your own.