For Chengwei Xia there is no separation between artmaking and the rituals of daily life. She works from her flat in North London where the onion skins from dinner are collected in a little plastic bag and stored in the kitchen cupboard, ready to be made into the yellow-brown ink she uses in her drawings.

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‘Look,’ she says, reaching up to retrieve an old condiment jar from the top shelf, ‘iron water’. I examine the rusty nails sunk at the bottom of the muddy liquid. ‘Do you ever worry your boyfriend might accidentally eat something he isn’t supposed to?’ I ask, casting my eyes over the old tubs of soup filled with semi-moulded inks laid out on the table in the open-plan living space. ‘Oh, he knows not to touch anything suspicious looking without checking first,’ she laughs with a shrug. The perils of living with an artist, I suppose.

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Moving to London from China to undertake an MA in fine art at the Slade, Chengwei has a keen awareness of her surroundings. It is the local that preoccupies her art, whether in the domestic scenes she draws and paints of the London flat she shares with her partner, or the ethereal way that daylight subtly enlivens a painted wall. Elsewhere, cosmic skyscapes of stars reveal themselves to be seeds she collected in a park, and the flowers she depicts are those that bud and bloom on the tree found just outside the flat window I sit opposite on an overcast February afternoon, cradling a cup of fragrant rose tea.

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Yet, it is in the very materials of Chengwei’s artmaking that the significance of the local and sustainable finds its full expression. ‘I started from avocado peel,’ she recalls, explaining her process of developing an array of coloured pigments from fruit and vegetable peel and nut husks. She tells me about the two summer months she spent at her grandmother’s house in rural Sichuan. Collecting leaves from fig, loquat and local five-leaved chaste trees, she made her own inks for drawing, noticing how the pigments from different plants of the same species varied in colour depending on where they had grown. Pursuing this variation in hue, she undertook her own experiments to alter the shade of the pigments, often darkening the inks with the ferrous acetate she showed me earlier that day, concocted by soaking rusty nails in water and vinegar.

 

Through her art practice, she shares in her grandmother’s deep connection to the rural Sichuan landscape, cultivated by the former through her lifelong labour in the surrounding fields. ‘When I look at the works I made in my grandmother’s home, I can feel the spirit and essence of the place in those colours,’ Chengwei explains. She recorded her process of collecting and transforming different natural materials into dye in a handmade colour book, which serves as an ongoing reference tool. For Chengwei, colour is no longer understood to be in service to the image but embodies the place from which its component elements are collected. ‘Initially, I used to think of drawing as an expression of myself,’ she writes on her website, ‘but now I perceive it as an expression of the materials themselves [which becomes] integral to the narrative of my art.’

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Chengwei’s active engagement with the natural world has been present from early life. She remembers how as a small child she would retrieve seedlings growing in the cracks of pavements. One day she brought home the tiniest of green shoots, which she planted in a pot on the balcony of her parent’s flat. This grew to be a pomelo tree, she says with a smile. When the family moved, so did the tree, and it was replanted in the garden of her grandmother’s house. It thrived in its new environment, beginning the flower and bear fruit the same year that Chengwei turned 18 – the age that an individual is considered to mature into adulthood in Chinese culture. Conceived as an autobiographical symbol with deep personal and familial connections, the pomelo tree recurs as a key motif in her drawings. ‘It’s something that still links me to my grandmother and her house,’ says Chengwei. ‘And when my grandmother looks at the pomelo tree, maybe she will know how I’m doing.’ 

 

The pomelo has inspired a deep love of citrus fruit in Chengwei. They have worked their way into the subject matter of her art – as in the oil-painted oranges that feature in her Slade degree presentation – and serve as the very material of her artmaking as she pulps the peel to make paper. Her relationship to citrus almost transcends from the natural to the philosophical as she tells me that the fruits encompass all the possible flavours we can taste (bar saltiness): the rind is zesty, the pith is tasteless, the flesh sweet and sour, and the seeds bitter. It is as if their rounded forms are little, self-contained worlds. I am convinced. 

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‘Are there challenges to working and living in the same space?’, I ask. I take in the short distance between the kitchen counters, worktable and mezzanine bedroom, thinking of my own desire to separate the different elements of my life. With a resounding ‘no!’, she tells me how the proximity of the table to the kitchen allows her to draw while she keeps an eye on her vegetal concoctions as they boil away on the hob. Once cooled, blended, dried and ground into pigment using a pestle and mortar, she rummages around the kitchen to repurpose old food containers to store her alchemical creations for future use: from nature to kitchen to paper.

 

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In the course of our conversation I am moved by Chengwei’s sincerity and her poetic outlook on the everyday, which she fuses with a warmth and gentle sense of humour. Following what she found to be a restrictive and demoralising year-long drawing course, she is currently engaged in a period of self-reflection. She shows me a small, unassuming work that she has set aside for my visit. Two holes have been burned into a fragment of paper created by repurposing the drawings she made during her recent training. ‘I don’t like those works, so I put them into a blender and they became paper mash,’ she says, with noticeable glee. The holes have been carefully repaired with wool using a darning stitch – a technique traditionally used to mend clothes – and surrounded by painted pink and yellow flowers from the tree that grows outside her house. 

 

The process of making this work has been impactful for Chengwei. She tells me that a friend who saw the work before the darning had taken place told her it was ‘very depressing’. But ‘maybe that’s how I was after the year of training,’ she confesses. ‘I feel after this small piece of work, I have created something new and I also feel repaired. I feel I’m starting a new period of life and a new period of creative work.’ 

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Art has always held a generative power for Chengwei, who began drawing in earnest after a period of illness forced her to leave her architectural job in Hong Kong to convalesce at her grandmother’s house in Sichuan. Although she had not drawn since she was a young child – when she tells me with a sly smile she had a penchant for illustrating naked women – every evening she would sit at a small desk to capture the minutiae of life unfolding around her. Originally planning to undertake postgraduate study in anthropology, she was struck by a conversation with a friend who asked her why she wasn’t pursuing art. ‘That question stayed with me for a long time,’ she says, and ultimately prompted her to take up her place at the Slade. Experimenting with oil paint for the first time, the experience set her off on an artistic journey that has brought her the sustainable mode of artmaking she pursues today. ‘It’s very surprising to me that I’m doing all these things,’ she confesses.

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We go into a second room at the back of the house to look at Chengwei’s paper-making equipment, before returning to the kitchen-cum-workspace. ‘What’s next?’ I ask. ‘Wool’. A trip to Edinburgh and a recent passion for knitting has opened up a swathe of questions for Chengwei centred on the production of yarn in Scotland. The idea of a research-based practice is appealing, offering her a way to expand her interest in local materials – whether it’s the plantlife of Sichuan or the different species of sheep in Scotland.

 

Realising that we’ve been talking for almost two hours, I make to leave, but not before I’ve been given instructions on how to sprout my own avocado seed and have had a kumquat pressed into my hand. I look down at the diminutive, slightly ovular fruit resting in my palm. I’m surprised by the feelings of tenderness that wash over me as I recall Chengwei’s story of the pomelo tree. I bite into the kumquat, my teeth passing through the thin skin to incise the juicy flesh. The flavours burst across my tongue. She’s right: zesty, bland, sweet, sour, bitter – an entire world.

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Kitty Gurnos-Davies

7 February 2024

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