Like many other young artists, Xu Hongxiang was educated at a formal art school, and gained his achievements through extensive selections and unremitting effort. Xu was born in Hunan Province, which boasts a great number of talents. Despite the fact that Xu graduated from the prestigious China Central Academy of Fine Arts, he has always maintained a low profile, disregarding the changing times and noise from the outside world. To Xu, art is the thing that he loves most and does best in. Without art, he would be nothing. At his studio in the remotely located Beijing Huantie Art Zone, Xu feels at home. Year after year, he has painted the paintings he wants to paint, and told the stories he wants to tell.

 

Image was Xu’s first interest, as he was a student at the Printmaking Department of CAFA. Many of the images that Xu adopts are from real life, such as those of his classmates, studio and the surroundings of the school, which express the artist’s identification with daily life. The issue of identification is, in fact, part of the structure of daily life. “Who am I?” “Who are we?” With the rapid changes in China’s contemporary society and culture, the young generation is becoming more and more self-aware. Images from real life are encouraged to construct the self-narration of the young generation, so as to balance the internal and external factors of identification. Therefore, in Xu’s works, he does not focus on the creation of “individual” images. Instead, he slices images from different sources into “groups” and scenes that the “groups” are in, and contemplates the complex relation between individual identification and group identification, thereby achieving self-description in parallel with contemporary life and popular culture.

 

Characters occupy the foreground or main part of Xu’s paintings, yet his focus is on scenes. In the materialized scenes, characters are accentuated as roles in the scene, as if the whole painting is a purposeful fiction, creating an illusion with a sense of identification. Such an accomplished focus can be attributed to his many experiments at graduate school. “I dissolve or remove part of the image with my method”, he says. From early 2009 to late 2010, Xu copied images onto canvas, then dissolved parts that were too realistic, giving a more straightforward effect. Xu sees himself as practicing the “anti-image”, yet the result of “anti-image” is still image. This paradox reflects his change of mind: from his own world, which is individual, internal, and private, to self-identification with introspection and individuality.

 

As an artist, Xu began to realize that the thinking arising from identification is not about “what identification is”, but about what gives identification a certain kind of appearance. The notion of identification can, on a whole, be seen as historically constructed. In other words, identification is the external result built from the past and others’ recognition of the past. Therefore, Xu turned his attention to historical images, indicating the self-defining tendency of growing identification. In what was a kind of turning point, Xu created two small paintings about crossing a river. Using old photos as source images and basing the paintings on them, he rendered the functionality of the image with his own method of dissolution, thereby revealing the self-conclusion that “transiency is always hidden behind eternality”.

 

After Crossing the River, Xu’s creation was centered on humanity and nature and body and memory. The transition from scene to scenery implies the artist’s thinking and discussion about humanity and nature, and such thinking and discussion become more malleable and liquid with the emergence of scenery. In fact, during the transition from scene to scenery, Xu created some scenery with characters. Different from previous scenes, the characters no longer take up the foreground or the main part of the painting. Instead, they retreat to the mid-ground or are even hidden behind other scenery. The characters also no longer face the viewer. Instead, leaves, branches or flowers block them, or they are just figures walking into the distance. With the emergence of pure sceneries, Xu seems to strengthen scenery’s existence in separation from humanity, which is left all alone. Maybe the artist has understood the transiency of humanity, both in groups and as individuals, as opposed to the eternality of nature’s scenery. Such transiency is not the eternal hiding the transient; rather, it is the transient becoming glorious because of the eternal. In his creative practice, Xu has translated his deep understanding of transiency into a depiction of the vitality of life. The thriving plants, the blooming flowers, the stiff fences, the mottled posters, the present, and the past – everything becomes so attractive in the scenery, no matter whether if it is faded or going to fade, and the spirit of life goes on forever.

 

Having left school years ago, Xu is quite different now, but I can still see his youthful spirit in his works. Moving on, Xu has turned his attention to explorations on body and memory. His works Meat and Meat and Meat can be seen as “sceneries of the body”, where the artist invokes memories of the long past and vivifies every detail. Indeed, Xu’s exploration on body and memory aims to arouse the vitality of the subject matter at hand. In this process, self becomes an organic essence that must be nurtured and developed, and finds its expression through artistic creation. Xu arouses feelings that construct “a development channel from the past to the predictable future”, one that transcends the limits of time and space and travels freely between the past, the present and the future.

 

On the other hand, Xu also returns to thinking on “painterliness”. “I also value the ‘painterliness’ of works, i.e. ‘how to paint’ or ‘what is the more fun way of painting’”, he says. “For instance, when dissolving the existing image, strengthening a certain part and leaving part of the original image, how to paint is more important than what to paint (plot). Painting is not copying. It must contain conceptuality and painterliness.” In fact, “return” is only a representation, and “painterliness” and image are not deadly foes. Xu’s expression of scenery is usually a representation of the internal essence, and the artist’s thinking on “painterliness” is more like a conceptual self-consciousness and introspection. While viewers can therefore feel the essence of life in the sceneries created by Xu, his courage to “root the self in the individual” also stands alongside as a form of invisible scenery.