Morono Kiang Gallery is proud to present Quotidian Truths: Paintings by Xia Xing, a new exhibition of paintings that recount the pain and pageantry of contemporary life as mediated through the news. This exhibition is Xia Xing’s first in the United States and the second installment in the Quotidian Truths series comprising three consecutive solo shows.

Stories of China’s international affairs, glorious triumphs, awesome tragedies, disenfranchised poor and nouveau riche all have something in common: they have each donned front page headlines in Beijing. Xia Xing’s almost-daily ritual practice of painting front-page newspaper photographs of these and other subjects from The Beijing News has enabled him to document the onslaught of daily dramas brought to the Chinese public.

Xia’s annual painting series consists of more than five-dozen paintings with accompanying newspapers that chart the most important people and phenomena of the passing year. In his reframing of what has transpired in the course of a year, Xia brilliantly interrogates the nature of collective memory and the complex manner by which information shapes knowledge.

Intense chromatic contrast, dynamic composition, and provocative subject matter are what give Xia’s 2006 series a climactic sense of urgency. The artist preserves the individual, temporal dimension of each of these painted stories by titling each work based on the date of publication.

The artist’s process of extraction and replication is itself also revealing. Drawing on instances of everyday life presented through the lens of a government sanctioned news outlet, Xia examines how seemingly random people, places and events form the substance of history-in-the-making and, thereby, hypothesizes both its integrity and its meaning.