XI NIU
for rhinoceros
gallery
Goal
Xi Niu (犀牛, rhinoceros in Chinese) is a special project at rhinoceros, the gallery on Via del Velabro in Rome founded by Alda Fendi in a building designed by Jean Nouvel. Curated by Claire Shiying Li, it gathers seven contemporary practices from China and treats the Silk Road not as a trade map but as a route still in use.
The identity had to hold two things at once: a Roman institution speaking Chinese, and a Chinese visual vernacular arriving in Rome. It runs across the exhibition graphics, a full merchandise line and the project website.
The mark
The name is the totem. 犀牛 sits beside its transliteration, and the animal comes from the woodcut printed in Rome in July 1515 to illustrate a poem by Giovanni Giacomo Penni — the first printed image of a rhinoceros in Europe, of an animal shipped from Gujarat only weeks before. An Asian animal, drawn for Western eyes in this same city.
The other end of the route has its rhinoceroses too. Four of the seven practices in the show come from or work in Chengdu, where an eight-tonne stone rhinoceros was lifted out of Tianfu Square in 2013 — said to be one of five that Li Bing set down to hold back the floods.
Blue on off-white, printed with the halftone left visible.
The website
The project site runs the exhibition as a three-column scroll, setting the artists’ works against the everyday objects the project keeps circling: a mailbox, a jar of chilli oil, a blue plastic stool.
Merchandise
The sparkling water is the centrepiece. Its layout is lifted from the Yeshu coconut milk carton, the Chinese packaging famous for filling every millimetre with stacked characters, red starbursts and exclamation marks. Penni’s rhinoceros takes the place of the coconut palm.
T-shirts, tote bags and caps carry the address like a shipping label: 犀牛 (XI NIU), rncrs™, Via del Velabro 9, 00186 Roma.
