Cvalda Xie — Glitch Angel
Chinese artist Cvalda Xie is a stylist, creative director, and image maker. Her style could be accurately described as futuristic and maximalist, with a nostalgic 90’s edge and an oblique anime leaning. Her cover designs for Tunica Magazine — an art publication that she and several friends and colleagues produce — features a tapestry of aesthetics and digitally assembled layers. The base is a photograph of what appears to be a glittery and extremely customized Japanese car, photographed with a shallow depth of field and then haloed in glitchy Photoshop effects. That image is fused with mirrored patterns along the edge, and then overset with bold and eye-popping typography. The color pallet is a warm combination of purples, pinks, chrome, gold and hints of green. Echoes of psychedelic art peek through, via the vibrating bright colors and the letters with depth and spatial presence within the 2D composition. It is a loud, visual explosion of neon future gothic aesthetics.
Xie’s other works share a through-line of playful and powerful futuristic fascination. A pair of portraits show figures in a natural landscape with surreal digital imagery placed onto it. In one, two forms stand on an island of reeds in the middle of a river. One of the forms is hidden beneath folds of a see-through plastic sheet, and the other form, feminine and bare-chested, stands above it, as a majestic CGI trail of water or clear cellophane issues out from their central position in the frame. The vision feels like a futuristic glance of otherworldliness, but it is also deeply rooted in the implicit balance and beauty of our natural world. Traditional foundations of art sensibility still underpin all of the work — the rule of thirds and the scale of the Golden Ratio structures the images and lends them grace. The figures are statuesque. The compositions feel painterly. The emanating shapes have the wispy S-curves seen in Mucha’s Art Nouveau muses. Almost inexplicably, some of her images recall Boticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus.’
The space between her photographic, editorial work and her graphic design leanings is wide. All rooted in future visions, the energy ranges from sublime and serene to cacophonous. The word that comes to mind to describe this latter aesthetic, her maximalist super-pop style, is Glitchcore. An online article on Fandom.com describes Glitchcore as “a visual aesthetic where a normal image is edited and distorted to contain heavily saturated colours and flashing patterns. Glitchcore usually contains characters or artwork from cartoons/anime.” Xie’s work does not fit neatly into this container, but shares several parallel sensibilities — i.e. “edited and distorted” images with “heavily saturated colors and … patterns” and bold, fantastical characters. She is clearly influenced by internet subcultures, and interprets this influence into her unique visual creations.
