《新京报》创刊于2003年11月11日，是中宣部直接领导的中共中央机关报刊《光明日报》和中共广东省委管辖的广州《南方日报》集团联合投资的一份通俗性报刊。《新京报》创刊以来，尽管遵从于中共的路线方针，却仍然赢得了中国最为进步的报纸的美誉，尤以一些最初几年发表的文章为代表，其大胆的风格迫使官方一再采取“纠正手段”应对，也导致了报刊内部一系列重大的领导层人事变更。

艺术家夏星（1974年生）是《新京报》长期忠实的读者之一，自该报创刊他就一直在收集这份报纸。夏星曾经接受过印刷方面的训练，1998年，他离开家乡新疆石河子，来到北京，找了一份广告摄影的工作，后来成为独立画家。感兴趣于后革命时代剧变的中国日常生活，夏星意识到这家可以每天卖出450,000份报纸对于当地公众舆论的重要作用，并因此于2005年呈现了最早的一组以《新京报》为主题的作品。他像是一个档案管理者或者信息收集员，每年从这份报纸中选出60张图片转换到画布上，创作了一份有关事件的视觉日记。2006年（含）以前，这些油画选择的都是报刊头版的图片而进行再生产，2007年始，图片选择也扩展到了其它各版。每幅画仅以相关发报期的日期命名，同一系列的作品尺寸相同，如“2004”系列的尺寸为70 x 100cm（66幅作品），“2008”系列尺寸为140 x 200cm（58幅作品），而“2009”系列的尺寸则缩小到35 x 50cm（60幅作品）。自部分完成于2005年的第一个系列“2004”开始，夏星创作的每幅画风格是根据每个主题来决定的，现实成分时多时少；但从2007年开始，他开始在创作中实验一种附加的新技术，这种技术使人联想到印刷的过程，即将黄、红、蓝以及其它可能用到的单色层进行叠印（分色法）。

夏星画作的素材来自于摄影，因此，每年一个系列的图像考察的构成方式与摄影创作相同，除了60幅作品以及相应的报纸之外，每幅作品还可以根据要求再复制两次，一个主题因此可以具有最多三个版本。这样，就像新闻通过媒体传播的方式一样，夏星的系列作品以视觉信息的综合和与之异质的个人故事两种方式存在着。

从内容来看，夏星在作品处理的主题上丰富多样，有像《07.01.07》那样以北京冬泳竞赛这种休闲活动为主题的作品，这幅画描绘了一群头戴08年北京奥运吉祥物福娃的中年女子冬泳队欢呼的场景；也有像《07.04.19》这种刻画灾难的作品，这幅作品呈现的是辽宁铁岭发生的钢炉滑落、砸死32名正在屋中开会的工人的悲剧事件。但从2009年开始，夏星的画作越来越多地集中到维护人权的话题上，促使这一题材产生的是2009年12月8日发生的一个事件，作为消费者代表的公民刘天晓在黑龙江哈尔滨举行的水价上调听证会上向一名官员怒仍矿泉水瓶。

北京麦勒画廊将于2011年1月29日至4月10日举办展览2007 / 2008 / 2009 / 2010，挑选夏星最近几年创作的这四个系列画作中的作品，一起呈现给观众。

展览中，通过重复并置地呈现在延展的时间跨度上创作出的作品，艺术家针对当下媒体刻意制造社会和政治新闻奇观的风潮、以及对于公众热衷于快速消费并导致最终对于新闻的麻木不闻所做的批判得到了更有力地强调，这四年的时间跨度，对于一个将目光无情地投向未来的国家其健忘的集体记忆来说，它足够之长。

翻译：苏伟

Xia Xing “2007 / 2008 / 2009 / 2010”

The Beijing News (Xin Jing Bao) is a popular newspaper founded on November 11, 2003 as a venture between Beijing’s Guangming Daily (directed by the Central Propaganda Department and supported by the Communist Party Central Committee), and Guangzhou’s Southern Daily Press Group (controlled by the Guangdong Communist Party Provincial Central Committee). Although intended to adhere to the Party line, since its establishment The Beijing News has gained a reputation as one of China’s most progressive newspapers. Some of the articles published in its first years are regarded as so audacious that the authorities repeatedly adopted “corrective measures” and made a series of major adjustments, replacing key personnel.

Among its most regular readers, The Beijing News counts Xia Xing (b. 1974), who has been collecting the newspaper every day since its first publication. Trained in typography and printing, Xia Xing left his native Shihezi, Xinjiang Province (Northwest China) in 1998 and moved to Beijing, where he found a job as an advertising photographer before becoming an independent painter. It was 2005 when Xia Xing, interested in the everyday life of fast changing, post-revolutionary China and aware of the significant influence over local public opinion held by a newspaper selling more than 450,000 copies per day, created his first series of works focused on The Beijing News. Like an archivist and records collector, the artist annually selects about 60 images that originally appeared in the newspaper and creates a visual diary of events by transposing the pictures onto canvas. In his series from 2005 and 2006, each oil painting reproduces a single picture exclusively published on the front page; in 2007, the artist also began to draw some of the source images from the newspaper’s inner pages. Simply named after the publication dates of the referenced newspapers, the artworks belonging to the same series are all the same size, which can range from 70 x 100 cm of 2004 (66 works), to 140 x 200 cm of 2008 (58 works), or 35 x 50 cm of 2009 (60 works). Since the first series 2004 (partly executed in 2005), the varying realism of the each individual painting’s pictorial style is determined by the specific subject treated; from 2007 onward, the artists began experimenting with an additional technique that is reminiscent of the printing process, resorting to the superimposition of monochrome layers of yellow, red, blue and eventually other colours.

The source material for Xia Xing’s paintings is photography. Accordingly, each yearly series of canvasses is conceived in the same way as a photographic edition: besides the whole work comprising approximately 60 pieces accompanied by the pages of the original newspapers, on request the artist can repaint a single canvas twice more, for a total maximum edition of three. In this way, and like the widespread diffusion of news through the media, Xia Xing’s series exist both as an entire body of visual information, and also as dissimilar individual stories.

With respect to the content, Xia Xing’s works are related to all kinds of news, spanning from amusing events such as the Beijing Winter Swimming Competition of 07.01.07, a painting depicting the middle-aged women of an unofficial, aspiring “Olympic Winter Swim team" who are seen cheering while wearing headgear in the shape of the Fuwa dolls – the mascots of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing – to the most tragic disasters, as in the case of 07.04.19, a picture representing a steel crucible that slipped onto a shed where workers gathered for a meeting in Tieling, Liaoning Province, killing 32 people. Since 2009, however, Xia Xing’s paintings have increasingly concentrated on the topic of the safeguarding of human rights, a subject matter initiated by an episode that happened on December 8, 2009, when a citizen named Liu Tianxiao, a representative for consumers, threw a bottle of mineral water at an official during a public hearing over rising water prices in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province.

For the first time, a selection of works from Xia Xing’s four most recent series will be featured together in the artist’s solo exhibition 2007 / 2008 / 2009 / 2010, on show at the Beijing space of Galerie Urs Meile Beijing-Lucerne from January 29 to April 10, 2011.

In this exhibition, the artist’s criticism of the media’s strong tendency to make social and political news spectacular, as well as the public’s fast consumption and the eventual oblivion of such press images, is emphasized by means of the repeated juxtapositions of paintings related to an expanded timeframe covering four years, a very long time in the forgetful collective memory of a country whose gaze is relentlessly cast into the future.