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Maison Ming Interior, Tai Hang, Hong Kong
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Xie Fan’s work at Maison Ming feels like a quiet conjuring of place—where light, matter, and time fold together. A faint seam, an in-between whisper lets shifting shadows dance, evoking stories that rise and fall. In the cracks and traces you can sense what has changed and what remains.- Alexis Dupont, founder of Maison Ming
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Celestial Signs
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Beginning with Xie Fan's iconic Celestial Signs series — an ancient code suspended overhead, the artist recalls the stars that have long functioned as humanity’s earliest clocks. Within this rhythm, the Moon appears not as a source of light, but as a mediator and echo of the Sun — a trace left behind as light withdraws, the very shadow of time.
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Golden Sea
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In the Golden Sea series, Xie Fan's interweaving of gold leaf and oil paint renders the water’s surface into a highly light-sensitive metallic skin — a breathing plane that carries the movement of the sky and reflects it back into the intimate interiors of the Maison Ming.
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Yet this pursuit of light and material does not remain in the past. For Xie Fan, Hong Kong itself is another vast “skin.” Sunlight and moonlight settle upon it daily — across building facades, streets, and zebra crossings — transforming into staggered footsteps and fleeting fragments of bodies in motion. The celestial cycle touches the asphalt; the scale shifts from the cosmic to the lived. The image moves from the sky to the street, from eternal recurrence to the immediacy of everyday life.
As one moves through the space of Maison Ming, the gold leaf in the paintings flickers in response to the light drifting in from Tai Hang’s streets. Cosmic time and urban rhythm overlap in this moment. “Ming” thus signifies both distant starlight and the illumination of the present second unfolding beneath our feet. -
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Flame
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As the gaze descends from the cosmic to the human, the Flame series introduces a different radiance: the light created in the face of darkness. By painting on terracotta panels—surfaces shaped by earth and fire—Xie Fan returns to the earliest material conditions of image-making. Here, the work is inseparable from the physical gesture and the mineral surface; painting is no longer mere representation, but a direct engagement with matter itself.
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Portrait of Xie Fan in his studio. Photo: Song Wenting
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