Organized by K. Gallery and curated by Yu Ke, the exhibition “Painting Diary: Su Xinping Solo Exhibition” was unveiled at 4:00 pm at the K. Gallery on April 18, 2015. It is worth mentioning that this exhibition is the first solo show of Su Xinping in the southeastern region of China.
Su Xinping, a benchmark figure in the field of contemporary art who also serves as the vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, professor and doctoral supervisor has been working in art education for over 20 years. His lithographs in the early period have gained him a wide reputation. In 1991, his first solo exhibition entitled “Su Xinping’s Prints Exhibition” was held at the Shanghai Museum of Art, after that it toured to the National Art Museum of China as well as some renowned museums in Europe and North America.
At the early stage of his development, Su Xuping used the painting language from the west to portray his natural perception of life on the prairie; when faced with the rapid reorganization of the Chinese society in the 1990s, he started to turn to externally record society: reform, conflict and turbulence which have become the keywords of this stage. When there are free conversions between the social function and artistic creation, the vision, mentality and thinking of Su Xinping has been completely unfolded, therefore he stepped onto a new stage of creation. He began to weaken the identified factors of “form” and “content” in paintings, slowly he quickly surpassed the personal schema which can be quickly recognized, thus reaching a realm of truly free and purified “painting language.”
Through continuously understanding and refining the language most familiar with himself, Su Xinping tries to find the art language that is fit for him, and he goes all out to achieve the contemporary conversion of concepts in the process of re-comprehending the spirits and concepts of traditional Chinese paintings.
“Su Xinping’s paintings might be called a realism of new objectivism. This kind of new objectivism should not only be understood as his enthusiasm for contemporary western artists in the texture of painting and the physical nature of the materials themselves. More importantly, it’s based on the observations and perceptions of the world view, to perceive of those objects as silent, unnoticed, unrecognized but also arousing our curiosity,” commented by art critic Yin Shuangxi.
Will painting really swim out of its social property into the realm of an artist’s individual perception that transcends time and space? Similarly, how can the conceptual source of the contemporary that is formed by the upsurges of popular culture, urban environment, capital markets, science and technology, games of politics make the artist perceive the truth of art in the structure of pure portraying language? This also constitutes the theme the artist would like to explore in this exhibition.
The exhibition will remain on view till May 31.
Courtesy of the artist and K. Gallery, translated and edited by Sue/CAFA ART INFO.
