Originally from Shanghai, China, artist Xie Caomin creates works that explore issues of acculturation, spiritual enlightenment and cycles of creation and destruction, dissolution and coalescence. We’re proud to announce Xie Caomin as our latest contributing local artist to the Distillery of Modern Art bottle collection. Caomin will contribute his work to our forthcoming whiskey bottle.
Based in Atlanta, Xie’s works have been widely exhibited around the world. His exhibitions have been displayed at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts in New York, at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art in China as well as in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia.
“I just want to say that I’m very grateful to the Distillery of Modern Art for supporting my artistic career. I think that the cooperation between local enterprises and artists could be a very worthwhile model for supporting and developing the contemporary art scene in Atlanta,” says Caomin. “My inspiration stemmed from a news photo of the Syrian civil war. It’s a photo of architecture debris with the Arabic word ‘Hope’ on the wall. I transformed the image into the form of Mandala, to embody the Buddhist concepts of the circle formation, existence, destruction, and emptiness.”
Mandalas are a marriage of mathematics and metaphysics. Their symmetries are meant to be a point of contemplative focus in which to realize the hidden repetitions and regularities of the (not necessarily religiously defined) universe. For Xie, many of the works seek to bring order to chaos, as with his label design based on Syrian graffiti, or prior works creating a Mandala from images of World Trade Center destruction.
Stay tuned for more information on the Distillery of Modern Art’s whiskey. Additional works from Xie Caomin are available on xiecaomin.com.