“Landscapes with Ritualistic Practices: Su Xinping Solo Exhibition” was unveiled at Guangdong Museum of Art at 3:00 PM on 18 October, 2015. Academically chaired by Huang Zhuan, the exhibition is co-organized by the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Guangdong Museum of Art, jointly sponsored by FM Art Space and HUAYI Gallery. The former President of CAFA Jin Shangyi, Secretary of the CAFA Party Committee Gao Hong, Deputy Secretary of the Part Committee of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts Huang Qiming, Chairman of Guangdong Weihua Group CO., LTD, Li Jianhua as well as over 60 artists, critics and collector from all across the country paid their special visits to the opening of this exhibition.
In Huang Zhuan’s opinion, Su Xinping’s art is mostly derived from his thinking about memory issues, the relationship between personal time and historical time in his art does not only reflect the struggle between the internal and external, but it also reflects the cyclical dialogues between the “ego” in the present time and “ego” in the past time. Therefore the gallery for this exhibition will be constructed into the image of a tunnel, and it is close and gloomy, like a grain of a time capsule, while Su Xinping’s work is like a ghost wandering in the tunnel. We intentionally split the linear time of all these works, his recent creations including “The Waste Land”, “Untitled”, “Eight Things” and “Expression” have been arranged alternately with his earlier creations including” The Lying Man and Receding White Horse”, “Wood Pile and Horses”, “The Silent Town”, “The Void Grassland” and “Sheep in Net”, constructing a context of dialogues cross space and time. This makes Su Xinping’s work in the past thirty years appear to be be arranged without order and placed in some mixed time pattern, we hope that the lithographs he created during the earlier period and huge landscapes he recently created will bring a visual surprise to the audience, moreover they will be able to appreciate the subtle difference in the main portion, connecting portion and sub-portion like enjoying a sonata. Among which, the ritualistic practices between the dynamic and the static is most worthy of our attention: his visual comprehension of the dialectical relationship between the eternal and the instantaneous moment of all things on earth.
In the gallery, a number of suggestive imagery has been set to guide the audience to spy on the psychological world of the artist behind the paintings, to experience the symbolic feature in Su Xinping’s art. Some of words the artist has read have been quoted and exhibited at the connecting corridors of the four galleries, such as from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot and All Things Bright and Beautiful by Jimmy Harry, these lines are not a parallel explanation of Su Xinping’s art, but they do belong to a kind of supplementary reflection between symbolic images of characters and symbolic images of pictures, the role they played for Su Xinping are just like the Greek mythology allegory, metaphors of Judaism, poems by Paul Celan for Kiefer, this world of languages are closely related to his world of images, which makes Su Xinping’s works in the situation of mutual perception among myth and reality, literature and history, the of rational and the world of sensation, languages and images.
The exhibition will remain on view till 30 October.
Su Xinping was born in Jining, Inner Mongolia. He graduated from the Printmaking School, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1989. He works as the Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, professor and instructor of doctoral students.
