Xu Lei: New Works

XU LEI 徐 累

徐 累 NEW WORKS M AY 1 2 - J U N E 1 8 , 2 0 1 6

XU LEI

2016

XU LEI

NEW WORKS

M AY 12 - J U N E 18 , 2 016

4 0 W E S T 5 7 T H S T R E E T | N E W YO R K | 1 0 0 1 9 2 1 2 - 5 4 1 - 4 9 0 0 | M A R L B O R O U G H G A L L E R Y.C O M

Movable Mountains, 2015, stone and metal, 15 3/4 x 89 3/8 x 23 5/8 in., 40 x 227 x 60 cm

DREAM REALISM

L I L LY W E I

Blue appears frequently in Xu Lei’s (b. 1963, Nantong, Jiangsu) paintings. In his recent work, his treatment of it is particularly evocative, suffusing his work with a lingering, even eerie beauty. Blue is the color of reverie, of nightfall and the hour before dawn, the time when dreams begin and end. It is the color of our most pervasive realities, the sky and sea above, around and beneath us. It conjures their familiarity, their utter mysteriousness. Blue also signifies a certain distance—psychological, metaphoric and visual—equating the immensity of nature with that of the human imagination, one interpenetrating and impacting the other. In Xu’s envisionings, blue binds together myth and reality and the permeability of their boundaries.

Indicative of the flux that is the universal condition, these works are not landscapes or historical narratives but conceptual constructs, theatre, meditations on time and place where past, present and future gather.

Xu said, when asked why he used blue so often, that “color is ideology.” He himself came of age in a time of red. It was the color of revolution, conflict and violence, of Mao’s Little Red Book and the East is Red, the de facto anthem of the Cultural Revolution. Blue was its opposite. To him, it represented silence, the spiritual, and an escape from the reality he grew up in, a color through which both reality and fantasy could be filtered.

Although active in the avant-garde art movements of the late 1980s in China, Xu chose to return to traditional Chinese materials (silk, paper, ink and mineral pigments) and methods by the 1990s, specifically the elegant, precise strokes of gongbi. It is a style of brushwork that suits realistic formulations, originating in the Han dynasty and attained its highest level of refinement during the Tang and Song eras. It began with the drawing of contour lines, followed by an application of color added a little at a time, similar to making a Renaissance painting or an Indian miniature, he explained, except the medium was water-based, not oil-based.

“Change can move forwards or backwards,” Xu observed. It’s not “conservatism or a retreat” to look to the past, but a “retracing and reviving” of significant points of departure in history and compared it to scanning the rearview mirror of a car that is rushing forward into the future. The result is a dynamic balance between past and present, modernity and tradition. It is an active dialogue, the exchange complex and not merely an act of homage or of appropriation, the latter much more of a Western concept. Aesthetically and conceptually, he positions himself between the ultra conservative and the radical. Developing an idiosyncratic, richly hybrid style, he integrates Western European and Chinese conventions without regard to stylistic eras. At its best, this blend of disparate cultures opens up and refreshes traditional languages, creating an increasingly expansive image base that more accurately reflects today’s cosmopolitanism. Based on an instinctive as well as a considered stance of opposition that is more either/and than either/or, these works also remind us that polarity exists at the core of Chinese philosophy. It is a worldview that combined Confucianism, an ethical and political system that shaped society and Daoism, a more personal and mystical view of life, joining order and the inchoate, the analytic and the intuitive. With the Confucian notion of a dynamic universe, there is also the Daoist notion of yin/yang (the passive, feminine; the active, masculine) that is not about duality or division but completion and complementarity in a cycle of constant transformation. It is also an exemplification of the “ten thousand things,” the ancient Chinese phrase that is the designation for everything that exists under heaven, recurrent creation generated by the opposing forces of the celestial and the mundane.

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Despite his interest in Western European art and art history and an inquiring, generally ecumenical mindset, Xu’s work has profound aesthetic, epistemological, and emotional roots in Chinese art, particularly in Chinese ink painting. In an age of globalization and homogeneity, he and like-minded peers are more than ever drawn to their own storied tradition, intent on finding new ways to keep it vital and move it forward. He has been cited as one of the most persuasive advocates for contemporary ink art in China, a genre that has gained support among younger artists eager to mine their own extraordinary heritage in their search for meaningful ways to express current issues. While Xu could have embraced a multimedia practice, as many Chinese artists have done, he was more deeply drawn to ink painting, to painting, and to the processes of the handmade, embracing ink as more challenging at the moment than the ubiquitous video, photography and installation art of so much contemporary art—a saturation that seems to have helped restore painting and other traditional media to the forefront worldwide.

The exhibition, consisting of more than a dozen works (many imposing in scale, one stretching horizontally to almost 24 feet), focuses on recent production with a few paintings from 2013 and 2014. The imagery is selective, concentrating on stones, mountains, seas, skies and horses in a variety of surreal guises and contexts, most of the surfaces washed in fluctuating, ethereal blues, either wholly or partially. One distinctive work in this grouping is a sculptural installation of rocks in shades of blue from darker to light, evoking a chilly landscape, the rocks both what they are and a representation of a soaring mountain range, colored to imply altitude, as if reflecting the sky or part of it, the assemblage then doubled, mirrored softly on the metal surface of the base it sits on. Layering illusionism, reality, and the paradoxical nature of identities and of things, it is a substantiation of a central theme of the show stating that art is mutable; within its domain, fact and fiction are twinned, irrevocably intertwined. Two earlier vertical paintings in enchanting blues, formatted like hanging scrolls, are titled Float-Sink No. 1 and No. 2 (both 2014). They point once again to the polarity of things and to transitions. Each figure resembles a craggy outcropping that is rising from the water, descending into it, or buoyed by it, an equal if not greater mass submerged beneath, raising the question of what is seen and what is not, in nature and in art. Two similar works from 2015 are more intricate, suggesting coral reefs or scholar stones (much valued by the Chinese literati) the solidity of the rocks riddled by fissures, the nature of their “rockness” in question.

The showstopper in this grouping is Landscape Fugue (2015), imaging what might be called the Chinese sublime, named for the contrapuntal musical technique in which a motif is introduced and then recurs throughout the composition, a repetition that applies to Xu’s oeuvre as a whole. It measures approximately 3 feet by 19 feet, and seems to extend in time like a film or an unrolling scroll painting. Again, there is the two-tiered world, one above, one below, the seen and unseen, the known and unknown, reminiscent of the dreamy, dissolving panoramas of the Song, updated. Its blues also suggest the atmospheric or aerial perspective of Renaissance paintings, a convention that was used to denote a deep jump into the pictorial plane, a color reserved for faraway plains and mountains, for sky, for space. Here, however, everything is blue, heightening a sense of serenity and majesty removed from quotidian reality. There is also a sense of melancholy and humility, the vast, echoing emptiness underscoring the lack of human agency, of our insubstantiality and precariousness in the face of nature and ultimate realities.

The theme of the “rainbow stone” was introduced in 2013. It held personal significance for the artist, a way out of the mazes he had been making, marking a return to terra firma and to nature. An early interpretation of the subject is included here, the image an arc shaped like a partial rainbow in full spectrum, the bands roughly textured as if they were rocks. The edges are rubbed, blurred as each band of color merges into the other. An imaginative and philosophical construct, his rainbow stones evoke yet again states of existence in flux as obdurate matter alchemizes into luminous, colored light. The inanimate becomes animate, perhaps even sentient in a constant cycle of potentiality, expanding our notion of what being is. Three other pictures of rainbow stones from 2015 clearly describes these transitions: one is in an incipient state, followed by the state of formation and then dissolution, the artist noting that this is “the natural process of everything,” in which the end is the beginning, the beginning the end in perpetuity.

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The horse is another significant image in the artist’s lexicon and has appeared often throughout his evolution, while the human figure does not. It is conceived as an impassive, enigmatic creature that is a delicate blue, or might be read as white behind a wash of blue in Augmented Dream and Dream on a Wire (both 2015), the former standing on a rocky ledge, the latter seemingly poised over an abyss as if on a tight wire, the thin inexplicable abstract line pinned to space. Representing the free, the noble, the pure, the sensual as well as the uncanny, these pale creatures out of dreams or nightmares appear to be apparitions from some other world, cryptic incarnations portending the unknown.

Prism of the Earth (2016), on the other hand, shows a standing equine skeleton in an interior divided by partitions that suggest stage flats, the floor the black and white diamond pattern borrowed from Vermeer and other Dutch genre painters that Xu has used often in the past. The ensemble is ironic, even humorous, the morbid crossed with the mordant, and is a critique on the conventions of pictorial depiction such as illusionism and realism, and a further exploration of the theme of transience and images of memento mori as a subset of still life, disrupting the comfort of genre painting’s domestic scenes.

The magnum opus in this equestrian series is the magisterial, flamboyant Messenger of Time (2015), its impressively elongated format alternating painted sections of horses and sections of wood veneer. It shows a herd of horses thundering across the surface with cinematic panache, changing in color, angle and scale as they move from left to right, the coloration shifting from violet to blue to red as if the lighting had been altered. The reference to the theatre is underscored by the introduction of the wood sections, configured to suggest curtains as well as its natural grain, recalling the beautifully rendered drapes that have so often appeared in his paintings to juxtapose the factuality of the material and the imagined. The last panel shows a single galloping horse in the style of Tang chargers. Viewed as if through an x-ray, its skeleton visible, it speaks of transition as imminent.

That Xu is deeply engaged in perceptual feints is quite evident, looking to the symbolists and the surrealists, to Magritte, Tanguy, and Ernst among others, to the questions raised by Van Eyck in his much discussed mirror in the Arnolfini Portrait (1434) or by Velázquez in the inclusion of himself painting a canvas in Las Meninas (1656) or by Zhou Wenju and Playing Go under Double Screens (10th c.) in a mise-en-abyme repetition of the scene. Of these works and others in Eastern and Western modes, he says that they are full of “rhetorical oddity.” We might say the same of his spellbinding, brilliantly executed, and also remarkably odd paintings.

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Except where noted, all works are Chinese ink and mineral on silk.

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Dream on Wire, 2015, 103 1/2 x 181 1/8 in., 263 x 460 cm

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Rainbow Stone: The Creation, 2015, 20 1/4 x 27 1/8 in., 51.5 x 69 cm

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Rainbow Stone: The Formation, 2015, 60 1/4 x 104 3/4 in., 153 x 266 cm

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Rainbow Stone: The Dissipation, 2015, 60 1/4 x 104 3/4 in., 153 x 266 cm

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Landscape Fugue, 2015, 34 5/8 x 231 1/2 in., 88 x 588 cm

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Floating Stone, 2015, 59 7/8 x 102 3/8 in., 152 x 260 cm

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Above Mountains, 2015, 52 x 56 1/4 in., 132 x 143 cm

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Float-Sink No. 1 and No. 2, 2014, diptych: each panel 63 x 38 5/8 in., 160 x 98 cm

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Augmented Dream, 2015, 60 5/8 x 106 1/4 in., 154 x 270 cm

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Messenger of Time, 2015, Chinese ink and mineral on silk and woodcarving, 35 3/8 x 281 1/2 in., 90 x 715 cm

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Prism of the Earth No. 2, 2016, 24 3/8 x 29 7/8 in., 62 x 76 cm

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Prism of the Earth, 2016, 39 3/8 x 63 in., 100 x 160 cm

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A Piece of Rainbow Stone, 2013, 19 1/4 x 23 1/4 in., 49 x 59 cm

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XU LEI AND CHINESE DRE AMS

M I C H A E L J . H AT C H

In June of 2005 an official slogan was released for the first Olympic Games hosted by China: “One World, One Dream” 同一个世界同一个梦想. Seven years later, another metaphor of dreaming was introduced into Chinese politics; as Xi Jinping rose to become the President of China and General Secretary of the Communist Party of China he did so under the slogan of a “Chinese Dream" 中国梦, a vision of a Chinese renaissance, a return to greatness through the simultaneous rejuvenation of the economy and of Chinese Communist values. Echoes of “The American Dream” resounded in this phrase; to everyone who shared this dream, opportunity was available.

This language of aspirations and dreams has played a significant role in the rhetoric of Chinese politics at the international and national levels in the last decade. But if there were a national dream shared by a people, what would that dream look like? What fantastic forms would emerge from the collective subconscious and what desires would they reveal?

Work by the painter Xu Lei offers at least one vision of what contemporary Chinese dreams might look like.

He presents images filled with luxury objects drawn from the Chinese past, juxtaposing them within surreal scenes in which they become passive arrangements of beautiful surfaces available for the projection of fantasies and dreams.

In doing so, his paintings prompt the questions of whether knowledge of the past is useful to contemporary Chinese viewers and what the history of China looks like from the perspective of contemporary Chinese audiences pursuing new Chinese dreams. *

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A washed-out likeness of China’s last emperor, Puyi, sits on a docile white horse with a polo mallet held down and at ease.

The blue of the Emperor’s silk overcoat stands in vibrant contrast to the diluted and wan features of the young man.

His clothes wear him. Staring out at the viewer, the figure of Puyi seems aware of the posed nature of the image he makes, hemmed in as it is by curtains from the left and right, and being set on a stage rather than on a playing pitch. The languid posture of his horse further undermines the fiction that a game of polo is actually about to happen. This animal is incapable of action. Yet the image is somehow alluring at the same time as it is impotent.

In Empty Shadow《虚影》(1991), the painter Xu Lei offers the memory of an image of China on the cusp of change. That memory reaches out to Bernardo Bertolucci’s film “The Last Emperor” (1987), and even further back, to the Chinese revolution of 1911, to Puyi’s figurehead position in the 1930s Japanese imperialist state of Manchukuo, and to his later rehabilitation in the Communist China of the 1950s.

The images Xu Lei places in his hazy, dream-like paintings are not neutral. But he would insist that they are not political either.

The shadowy stages and veiled rooms of his paintings are populated with images taken from the decadent visual culture of China’s imperial past and combined anachronistically to strange but alluring effect. There are noble horses, painted as they might have been for the eighteenth-century court by resident Jesuit advisors, but now tattooed on the flank with cobalt blue floral patterns from fifteenth-century porcelain. Exotic birds perch and pose as they would have in eleventh-century paintings made for the emperor, but instead they linger on the crossed legs of an early twentieth-century Shanghai sophisticate half hidden behind a screen. Emblazoned on such screens are maps in a style like those meant only for imperial viewing in the sixteenthcentury Chinese court, a sort of image that never would have been adhered to decorative screens and used to section off

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Fission, 1987 ink on paper 78 3/4 x 157 1/2 in., 200 x 400 cm

an interior scene, as they do in Xu Lei’s work. The toned flesh of fine horses, the lush plumage of rare birds, and the ghosts of imperial China are instantly recognized and desired images, but they are divorced from contexts and juxtaposed in surreal ways. Messages seem to slip away. Interpretation fails. We are left with the surfaces of forms.

By contrast, throughout Xu Lei’s childhood in the China of the 1960s and 70s in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, and during his education in the early 1980s in Nanjing, images were unambiguous. Visual culture was dominated by state propaganda, and in propaganda images were only allowed one meaning. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the visual culture of China began to slowly diversify, and especially during the economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the late 1980s, Xu Lei was part of what became known as the “’85 New Wave,” a trend in which artists began to push the boundaries of acceptable public displays of art with new varieties of visual language and group art practices, including abstraction, surrealism, performance art and installation.

In a work like Transgressor《逾越者》(1986), Xu Lei’s early experiments with surrealism are apparent, and in particular his interest in Magritte. The vaults of heaven in this painting are carved out of the blue sky in long barreled arches, causing a conflation of interior and exterior space as well as a confusion of flatness and depth.

In 1989 Xu Lei participated in the pivotal “China Avant-Garde” exhibition held at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, an exhibition that punctuated the halls of an official state arts venue with a variety of institutional critiques in visual form. Xu’s two-by-four meter ink rubbing of asphalt, titled Fission《裂变》(1988), hung alongside the 24

work of Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Peili, Wang Guangyi, and Huang Yong Ping, artists who would come to define contemporary Chinese art, especially to Western eyes.

Fission appears to be an image of nothing. It presents a sea of cracked black surface. But it evokes the materials of a quickly modernizing China as well as the classical techniques of epigraphy rubbing. The title refers to a process of nuclear physics, while the image itself looks like the satellite map of a marshy landscape broken by a meandering grid of organically-defined waterways.

The material referenced is only asphalt, yet during the slow process of urban modernization during the 1980s, asphalt surfaces were uncommon, even in the nation’s capital. Underlying these more modern associations, the process of rubbing stone surfaces has a particular history in China, one associated with the preservation and study of inscriptions found on ancient stone monuments. Scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in particular made a habit of scouring their local landscapes for fragments of carved stone surfaces in order to explore the early roots of calligraphy. By rubbing the new stone surfaces of the rapidly changing capitol, Xu Lei’s presented an ambivalent critique of both the modern re-surfacing of China and of the outmoded habits of would-be antiquarians. What place did older modes of research and reproduction have in the all the newness of 1980s China?

After 1989, currents in the contemporary art world of China changed again dramatically. Most artists retreated from the limelight in one way or another. Some withdrew from the art world in toto. Others found a way to leave the country and make art elsewhere. Some resorted to the frivolities of the classical Chinese past, leading to “New Literati Painting” 新文人画, a trend in which the materials of ink and paper were used to create landscapes and figure paintings filled with idle pleasure-seekers. Others struck a similar tone of escapism in what came to be known as Cynical Realism, which bypassed the problems of the present through a celebration of superficiality, cued in the work of several painters by the constant but forced expression of amusement seared into on the faces of frantically laughing heads.

The social uncertainties caused by the political events of 1989 also bred skepticism and pessimism in arts

circles, and a turn away from the dynamic group activities of the 1980s art world. For Xu Lei, this skepticism took the form of an extreme introspection and an increased interest in the emptiness of images. Like the “New Literati Painters,” Xu Lei turned to earlier modes of art making in order to be avant-garde. He took up the medium of water-based pigments on silk or paper, as well as forms associated with China’s past. His interest, though, was not in the literati celebration of elitism and calligraphic brushwork. Instead, he wanted to form his own standards of quality and his own lexicon of empty forms.

It was at this time that he began to paint images such as Empty Shadow, which drew on the allure of objects from the past but sought to deny those objects any specific historical content. In Xu Lei’s own words, this was “not a Buddhist emptiness, but an aesthetic emptiness, as in Zhuangzi,”1 an emptiness of forgetting fixed meanings.

In tenor, this attitude shared a lot in common with Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” (1964). Rather than carrying out the radical alteration of the images of the past “in order to set up a shadow-world of ‘meanings’,”2 as Sontag described the act of “reactionary interpretation,” Xu Lei’s art stressed the emptiness of past forms by favoring the immediate sensory experience of those forms. Like Sontag, Xu Lei was seeking an art that had “the capacity to makes us nervous.” In viewing Xu Lei’s painting, that nervousness arises in the tension between the desire to interpret and the lack of any information to do so.

Xu Lei’s work of the 1990s continued in the same vein as Empty Shadow, showing dream-like spaces with alluring juxtapositions of historical forms interacting anachronistically. At the heart of this work was an uncertainty that we can know anything about what we see. The roots of this question lay in the experimental art of the 1980s, of learning to void forms of their meaning after a long period in which meaning was over-determined in all art forms. But during the 1990s the private accumulation of material wealth began to visibly differentiate classes in China. Over this time, Xu Lei’s work developed a sensuous and surreal ambiguity, grounded in images from the late Qing empire and from the metropolitanism of 1920s Shanghai. He created a limited but effective vocabulary of images including cages, draperies, folding screens, domesticated animals, flowers, maps, and the obscured traces of human presence, framing these forms

The Illusory Stone, 1996 Chinese ink and mineral on paper 33 1/2 x 25 5/8 in., 89 x 65 cm

in condensed, stage-like settings of overlapping screens that allowed for the concealment of forms and the conflation of depth and flat surface.

In The Illusory Stone《虛石》(1996) a rock dove sits on the back of a classical square-backed armchair, peering over its shoulder. The chair is positioned facing out toward the viewer, as the chair in an ancestor portrait would be, except this chair remains empty. When pronounced in Chinese, the title, which could have the alternative translation of “Empty/Concave Stone,” is also homophonous with the binary of “true-false.” Xu Lei’s paintings tread this boundary of identification between what is and what is not. Is an image flat or dimensional? Does the event happen in a dream or is it a space we might potentially encounter?

This play between form and space is found at one level in the rockery painted in blue on the set of screens set behind the central chair. Large rocks were used in classical

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Empty Pool, 2000 Chinese ink and mineral on paper 25 5/8 x 33 7/8 in., 65 x 86 cm

gardens to create landscape shapes and these rocks were judged on their formal balance of positive and negative spaces, qualities seen to reflect the larger principles of formal balance in the cosmos.3 But Xu Lei flattened this play of depth, and flattened it twice over, once because the viewer can recognize that the painting is a flat surface, and a second time because within the image there are flat screens on which those rocks are painted. Xu Lei further asserted this flatness with a series of hard black lines at the bases of each screen within the painting. Positioned parallel to the viewing plane or at an angle to it, each line indicates the directionality of a screen within the image. But it is unclear whether the paintings of rocks on these varying planes run with or against the direction of these black lines, creating a house-of-mirrors effect that calls into question what is true and what is false about this image and images in general. Viewers are invited to sit in this place, but then that space is made uncertain and uninhabitable.

At times people appear to be present on these surreal stages, as in Empty Pool《虛池記》(2000), where a figure sits in a bath, holding a classically-printed Chinese text above the rim of the bathtub with one hand in order to read it. The identity of the figure is uncertain as a full view of the scene is blocked out by a freestanding screen on which a map is painted. We shift from a depiction of interior space that might be continuous with ours to one that is topographical and expansive. The map is clearly demarcated

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with cardinal directions. “East” sits at the far right side of the screen, butting up against the edge of the painting.

“West” lies to the far left, and north is at the top, its character split down the middle between the two screens. An array of waterways and landmarks are labeled on the painting but with non-topographical names, including dates, adjectives, and strange fragments of syntax. “Not Me” 不我 is not far from “Forgotten Words” 忘言, and “Invitation to a Guest” 留客 is downstream from the phrase “bingding” 丙丁, a fire-related aspect of the Five Phases of Transformation, associated with Taoist thought. If the map gives sense to any particular place it is one defined by a personal lexicon.

The painting also makes direct reference to David’s oil painting The Death of Marat (1793), an image of a French revolutionary writer stabbed to death in his bathtub. For anyone recognizing this painting within the painting, a moment of tension arises in knowing what may come to the figure behind the screen. Yet while everything in this scene appears to have the patina of history and the promise of historical context, meanings become detached when these forms are constituted in a set of alluring surfaces on a shifting stage, leaving a confused but memorable scene, much like a dream.

The uncertain spaces that define Xu Lei’s work also make them dream-like. As in dreams, any sense of a clear narrative that might exist between the forms shown in the paintings is broken up, in this case by the obscuring devices of curtains, screens, and the diffused washes of medium-tone grey and blue that cast a mist over all forms, reinforcing a sense that the events shown are nocturnal, and certainly imagined. In Smoke Rider《骑烟》(2009) this misty blue haze of dream space is further figured in the cloud plume that begins as a wisp over the back of a blue-white horse. The dreams of sleeping protagonists in illustrated Chinese literature and in porcelain decoration from the seventeenth century onward were pictured in clouds of this exact shape.

A suggestion of barely-suppressed desires further helps to define these paintings as dream spaces. There is sensuality and an erotic dimension to Xu Lei’s work, figured in veiled forms and the musculature or feathers of animals in the dim light. That eroticism is at its most explicit in Memories of a Graceful Servant《念奴娇》(2009), in which two interior spaces are divided by a complicated system of

screens. To the left the head of a dark grey-blue horse bows to sniff at a heeled woman’s shoe filled with a shoe-stay or mannequin’s foot, suggesting a fetishist’s interest through an animal-like curiosity. To the left, a rumpled sheet of the same dark grey-blue color lies over a low platform standing in front of scene of two lovers engaged in foreplay. This image within the image is drawn from an amalgamation of classical illustrated and painted sources, and is as explicit as classical Chinese illustration ever was.

This projection of dreams and desires onto forms from classical Chinese art has a parallel manifestation in the exponential growth of the classical art market that has coincided with Xu Lei’s career. As the auction market developed in China in the early 2000s, it became apparent that collectors’ interests favored early modern and premodern art much more than contemporary art. Throughout that period record prices were constantly set and broken for the highest quality imperial Qing ceramics and for paintings by canonical Chinese masters. For every auction of contemporary art there were ten of classical art. In the 2000s collecting the visual evidence of China’s luxurious preliberation past became a passion for contemporary Chinese citizens benefiting from the new wave of hyper-capitalism that resulted from Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the 1980s.

When seen together with the growing trend of Chinese nationalism, the passion of contemporary Chinese collectors for classical Chinese art reveals a desire to connect to what it means to be Chinese in the longue durée sense.

Demonstrating a command of Chinese history on the level of the personal collection of material objects is a privilege that was denied for most mainland Chinese in the latter half of the twentieth century. But how have attitudes toward that past changed in the meantime?

If the positioning of the past as shown in Xu Lei’s paintings is any indication, then that past is being emptied of its content in order to be filled with the aspirations, desires, and fantasies of a new class of contemporary Chinese elites.

At times Xu Lei has described his use of recycled forms as “post-modernist,” a term that makes sense in relation to Fredric Jameson’s description of the post-modern as “a refusal to engage the present or think historically,” a characteristic of “schizophrenic consumer society.”4 In Xu Lei’s own words he wants to “use beauty to express emptiness…like Warhol.”

Smoke Rider, 2009 Chinese ink and mineral on paper 67 3/4 x 35 3/8 in., 172 x 90 cm

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From the American perspective, Xu Lei’s images trigger a similarly disconnected and ahistorical set of desires and fantasies, which we have learned to describe as Orientalism. In America the debate of how images can be presented as “Chinese,” and to whom they can be presented as such, was recently triggered by the Metropolitan Museum in New York presented “China: Through the Looking Glass,” which the institution described as “a collective fantasy of China.” The runway couture of designers from Dior to Alexander McQueen was posed alongside canonical examples of classical Chinese art, including fourteenthcentury murals of Buddhist paradise, eighth-century silver mirrors, and nineteenth-century imperial court attire. The exhibition was meant to highlight the history of a Western fascination with the East in fashion. It also sparked debate

things piques desires. It is even better if those exotic things have the added caché of historical patina.

In the twenty-first century in America any responsible discussion of the allure of exotic surfaces must take into account issues of imperialism, race, and history. But when a similar aesthetic is employed by artists like Xu Lei, what do we call it? What is the effect of presenting to the viewers of the Chinese present a vision of the Chinese past as a collection of exotic surfaces?

Xu Lei’s paintings are like the fashionable orientalist surfaces designed by John Galliano and Yves Saint-Laurent in that they present imperial Chinese motifs and luxury materials from China’s past ahistorically and for maximum visual appeal. But they are much more powerful because they give a voice to the changing relationship that

Memories of a Graceful Servant, 2009 Chinese ink and mineral on paper 35 3/8 x 66 15/16 in., 90 x 170 cm

among some cultural critics, who asked, was this “charming chinoiserie or imperialist orientalism?”5

The juxtaposition of twentieth-century consumerist fashions with the kinds of objects that inspired them in an institution that generally historicizes such objects was cause for concern. To some, the exhibition seemed to be robbing Chinese objects of their histories all over again, treating them merely as surfaces to enjoy. Holland Cotter of the New York Times characterized the dominant “ethic and aesthetic” of the show as “lookism, attention to surface as a measure of value and authenticity.”6 The beauty and allure of exotic

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contemporary Chinese viewers have to the forms of their past. A contemporary Chinese reconfiguration of the classical past indicates a shift in attitudes toward history, and when the citizens of a country with the largest population and the second highest gross domestic product begin to re-imagine their vision of the past, that is an event worthy of attention. *

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Beginning in 2012, Xu Lei began a series of paintings on silk titled Qi and Bone《气与骨 》, which departed from the

Qi and Bone, 2012 Chinese ink and mineral on silk 34 1/4 x 58 1/4 in., 87×148 cm

framing vocabulary of screens, draperies, and stages, and which moved away from the dream spaces established by those devices. Depicting large-scale landmasses emerging from deep cobalt blue oceans, this group of paintings plays with a contrast between similitude and the partially abstracted texturing techniques used in classical Chinese landscape painting traditions. The undersides and the abovewater portions of the islands in these paintings are depicted in two contrasting visual languages. Above the surface, in cool grey ink, landforms are brushed out in texture strokes associated with canonical painters from the tenth through fourteenth centuries, including Fan Kuan (ca. 960-1030) and Ni Zan (1301-1374). Below the waterline, rocks shift in and out of visibility in deep tones of Xu Lei’s signature blue pigment, and are articulated in a more realist style that takes into account the diminishing play of light on stony bridges and caves that descend deep under the water. Sitting like quiet leviathans on still oceans, these islands purport to show the nature of landscape in a classical Chinese visual language only to reveal a second, equally-true, nature submerged below the water. In these works, Xu Lei continues his themes of concealment and suggestion, retaining his surrealist style by asserting that there is often a fundamental difference between what we see and what is. In this latest work (Chinese) surfaces are still not what they seem.

¹ Interview with the author, January 10, 2015.

2

Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, (New York: Noonday Press, 1966), 7.

3

See John Hay, Kernels of Energ y, Bones of Earth: the Rock in Chinese Art, (New York: China House Gallery, China Institute in America, 1985).

4

Hal Foster’s description of the argument in Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash., 1983), xii.

5

Lauren Jacobs, “ ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ Review: Stitching Together East and West,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2015.

6

Holland Cotter, “Review: In ‘China: through the Looking Glass’ Eastern Culture Meets Western Fashion,” New York Times, May 7, 2015.

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left: detail of Messenger of Time, 2015 right: Han Gan, Zhaoyebai, Tang dynasty

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THE DARKROOM OF XU LEI

T A N G K E YA N G

Even before the invention of photography, the concept of the “darkroom” existed. The word hints at two ideas: creating a picture of the world through an immobile “negative”—as with pinhole imaging; or else a more sophisticated means of “developing” these images, so we forget their fundamentally illusory nature. Of course, these pictures don't come from the primitive world of Plato's cave, but the refracted soul of a “higher” civilization, such as the pastimes enjoyed by the ancient Romans with their exquisite, indulgent way of life.

In Xu Lei's work, we find a similar “darkroom,” perhaps because the world projects itself onto his landscapes in the same indistinct manner as an object is captured on a negative, and later developed. His paintings put me in mind of the indoor ancient Roman “garden” at Villa Livia. Two thousand years ago, untainted nature should have stood there, or perhaps we ought to say this interest in nature is different from now, people like thousands of pigeons looking out at the world from their cages, the latter panting for the necessity of life between the cracks, the former engaged in more aggressive spiritual pursuits. In the dining room of Villa Livia, the “garden” on display was actually an illusionistic fresco, later preserved and reinstalled at the Palazo Massimo in Rome, purporting to show the “outside” whilst actually being “inside”. At first glance, this is the prototype of a certain western style of “picture gallery”, and the “garden” is simply an unframed painting following the principles of naturalist way of seeing. Yet when the pictorial space of a fresco is dependent on an actual space, it often gives rise to an odd, unreal sensation, validating the idea that “inside” and “outside” have come to be mixed together.

With their richly suggestive settings and penetrating perspectives, Xu Lei's early work fully demonstrates the connection between “in” and “out”, similar to the example of Villa Livia, the first type of apparent darkroom. Initially it appears you're indoors, the tightly-sealed darkroom feeling somewhat claustrophobic. Yet after spending some time

here, you find yourself slowly falling into a larger illusory landscape, as if returning to the time of Pliny and Augustus, rather than still being in a building. Here you won't find the “picture frames” you'd expect to see in a picture gallery, while the walls around you present a garden of lush greenery and graceful trees, and the cool winds only to be found in an enclosed room waft towards you, seemingly more pleasant than the actual outdoors could ever be.

Which isn't to say that enchanting landscapes don't exist beyond the villa, but it was the images on the walls, rather than actual scenery, that constituted the Romans' idea of “outdoors”. During the scorching summer season, they would dine here surrounded by an eternal spring—the fragrance of iris and chamomile blossoms, grouse, pigeons and finches soaring between palm trees, pines and oaks... while pomegranates and quinces hung from the branches, an impossible seasonal combination in real life, emphasizing the difference between this imaginary landscape and the actual outdoors.

This is the starting point of Xu Lei's “darkroom.”

Just as Roman frescos seem to confer instant immortality, this Chinese artist creates an eternal built environment in his paintings, which surely is also the world in which Li Cheng and Guo Xi, not to mention other famous artists throughout history who've “sought from within”, lived in, by its very nature a garden of the soul—though compared to the Roman world, this garden requires other forms of light to illuminate it.

On one hand, within the frame of Xu Lei's work, we feel a similar atmosphere to Villa Livia, the artist's overriding imperative to recreate actual life, just as Xu Lei attempts to use the realistic image to freeze ever-flowing time. On the other hand, such an ambition is at odds with the situation contemporary Chinese artists find themselves in, because we do not exist in “that” endless landscape, but rather outside of it, in an invisible “darkroom” looking back

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at everything, silently spying on it... As a creator, Xu Lei has undergone rigorous training in traditional Chinese painting, but keeps a strict distance from it, making him both an obvious insider and inevitable disruptor of the status quo, drifting between the visible and invisible orders, working hard to maintain various different equilibria; his images are replete with meaning, almost cloying, except that at the last moment, one or two silent gaps appear in this fullness. His compositions are often symmetrical, or abide by stringent rules of construction, yet at every moment are semantically inverted objects, growing images cared for and nourished by the artist, suddenly collapsing at the very moment they reach maturity, becoming nothing... Xu Lei tells me that he strives to exterminate the “binary” we have such faith in, the world view that can only contain yes or no.

In his view, the world is always in the process of reversing its direction, a new means of understanding the “middle way.”

Such an image conceals a state of instability, hinting that the invisible darkroom might finally lead to a major, unforeseen event; such as the woman in the doorway in Han dynasty stone engravings, forever existing in a liminal state, liable to vanish at any time, never to return... or more concretely, in Xu Lei's painting, a white horse flashes past a crack in the door, flying along a line as thin as a wire, breaking apart in a fog-filled vision; stones are solid, yet also permeable and brightly-colored, and a rock amidst water seems both to be sinking and rising at the same time...

The shutter clicks, and in the length of time it takes to rise and fall, practically becomes time-lapse photography, as the struggles of different worlds parade before the lens, and we obtain a unique photograph—exposed many times, images overlapping, yet giving a clear sense of a speck of decay within the static world.

His most recent series is called “aegirite”, seemingly a footnote to precisely such circumstances—and when assessing an artist by an entire body of work rather than a single piece, time becomes more important, wiping away incomplete, drab reality, turning it once more into

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illusions, into atomic particles of the world, as with Taihu rock, acquiring rainbows moving at three different speeds as they arc across the sky—that is, the “illusion of illusion”, so even illusion itself goes through the process of appearing and vanishing. In our hearts, the mighty Chinese traditions have undergone such a modernization, going through the process of becoming contemporary, no longer complete but shattered into pieces, moving towards a poetic death, or else full circle to a new beginning. From the Buddhist point of view, the process from fulfillment to stagnation and rot goes: attainment, stasis, decay and finally nothingness.

Perhaps the most apt comparison isn't Villa Livia, but Pompeii, one of the few perfectly-preserved Roman ruins, the Livia gardens dissected in public. Everyone knows about this site, buried in volcanic ash and excavated in the eighteenth century, giving us the opportunity to face a two thousand year old reality, just as Xu Lei's work uses the techniques of Ingres to “develop” an image on ancient interiors, with similar straightforwardness, enabling the viewer to get a strong sense of antiquity directly from these classicist works, a form of time travel. Yet it must be pointed out that in a true historical context, this gaze obviously carries the intention to deconstruct, so the pictorial whole is created solely to be a ruin.

For Xu Lei, these ruins are the result of a deliberate process, built on the destructive foundation of aegirite, the artist removing the ashy covering of a classical veneer, one shovelful at a time, leaving its true, unsettled face to be exposed to modernity.

As the physical darkroom vanishes, everything we see from our vantage point atop the rubble of tradition is an illusion – again, the “illusion of illusion”. In fact, ancient cities were not as open as the ruins of Pompeii; there were many old-fashioned painters of the sort who still exist today, insisting on holding on to their warehouse-like studios. If the volcano of modernity hadn't erupted, there would still be darkrooms of the same ilk as Villa Livia. But lava did engulf the world, and because it lay too thickly and heavily overhead, when reality was excavated, most of the roofs and walls had collapsed, doors and windows disappeared,

meaning no darkroom in the technical sense could exist. Xu Lei and his colleagues now have to face an “open” reality.

As for the exposed brick structures, barely different from each other, within the ruins they have lost the distinction between “in” and “out”. If not for the deliberate reconstructions of various archaeologists, the dividing line between one building and another, one space and other, would not be easy to pinpoint. In the same way, we observe Xu Lei's work though its exquisite forms—not through the fixed shape of any ancient space, in fact, but amongst traditions that have collapsed beneath the heavy weight of the modern, where from the perspective of the modern viewer, there are as many points of view as Rashomon; it is not bound to any arbitration, but exists as the sort of silent ruin so beloved by romantic souls. Now, this maze-like visual structure can be reorganized and made co-contextual, endlessly producing new sensations and meanings.

And that's exactly it. In Xu Lei's work, the multiplicity of the world arises not merely out of games with scenography and tableaux, but also comes from re-arranged meaning and space. Yes, and time too. Perhaps the latter allied with the former is the essence of Chinese art.

No matter how melancholy it leaves us to long for a past that can never be recovered, everything Xu Lei's art accomplishes comes from its verisimilitude, just as any photograph developed in a darkroom must remain loyal to its negative, even if this darkroom is not that visible. This is especially true when actual spring arrives, when even a ruin will have the same breath of life and joy, fragrant plants and wild flowers growing within the earliest interior, transforming the ruins into a true garden. Here, nothing matches completely with what was already there, but everything comes with even more unknowable significance, inviting you to turn it over and over in your mind.

Uncertainties, 2009 Chinese ink and mineral on paper 51 3/16 x 25 5/8 in., 130 × 65 cm

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XU LEI 1963 1984

Born in Nantong, Jiangsu Province Graduated from the Fine Arts Department of Nanjing Arts Institute The artist currently teaches at the China Academy of Arts.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2016

2015 2013 2011

2010

2008

New Works, Marlborough Gallery, New York, New York Xu Lei Solo Exhibition, National Museum of China, Beijing, China Fugue – Xu Lei, Suzhou Museum, Suzhou, China Veneer of the World – Xu Lei, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China The Story of Emptiness, Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery, Hong Kong Blue Dream, Asia House, London, England Silent Voices: Ink Paintings by Xu Lei, Mee-seen Loong Fine Art LLC, New York, New York Xu Lei: Revivification of the Tradition, Asian Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 1999 Illusions: Xu Lei’s Art Exhibition, Keyi Gallery, Nanjing, China 1997 New Work, Browse & Darby Gallery, London, England 1995 The Mystery of Absence: Xu Lei’s Art Exhibition, Alisan Fine Arts, Hong Kong 1994 Solo Exhibition of Xu Lei, Jiangsu Art Museum, Nanjing, China 1991 Cultural Office of the Italian Embassy, Beijing, China SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2016 Elaborate Works Exhibition of Fine Brushwork, National Art Museum of China,

Beijing, China

The 9th International Ink Art Biennale of Shenzhen, Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen, China 2015 Ink and Wash Articles-Change in the World of Colors, Wuhan Art Museum, Wuhan, China

Painting Twenty Multiplied by Twenty, Poly Art Museum, Beijing, China

Nonfigurative, Shanghai 21st Centry Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China 2014 Reset Chinese Contemporary Art, Soka, Art Center, Bejing, China

Rendering the Future–Chinese Ink Painting Exhibition, Asia Art Center, Bejing, China

Reform Art-system by Ancient Example–Contemporary Elaborate-style Painting Exhibition, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China

The 3rd Hangzhou Chinese Painting Biennale, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou, China 2013 The 9th National Exhibition of Chinese Hue Art Paintings, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China

Lightness – One Clue and Six Faces, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China

Image/Illusion – Contemporary Chinese Art Series I, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China

Ink, Sothebys, New York, New York

2012 2011

2010

Sanfanjiuran – New Gongbi Painting Invitational Exhibition, Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, China Future Pass – From Asia to the World Touring Exhibition, Venice, Italy 2011 Chengdu Biennale, Chengdu, China Reshaping History China Art from 2000 to 2010, Beijing National Convention Center, Beijing, China Pavilion of China at The 12th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy 2009 The Living Chinese Garden, Chinese Gardens for Living, Europalia International Art Festival, the Square Brussels, Belgium 2008 Illution/ Nature – The New Direction of Chinese Gongbi, Beijing Art Academies Gallery, Beijing, China

Zeichen im Wandel der Zeit: Chinesische Tuschemalerei der Gegenwart, Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany; traveled to Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Germany

New Age – The Road of Chinese Painting, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China 2007 What’s Next – Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition, Hong Kong City Hall, Hong Kong

Sensitivity – Memory form: Twelve Artists’ Works, Dimensions Art Center, Beijing, China

Rotation, Nanjing Qinghe Contemporary Art Center, Nanjing, China 2006 Poetic Reality: A Reinterpretation of Jiangnan, RCM Gallery, Nanjing, China

South-east China: Group Exhibition of Hong Lei, Tang Guo and Xu Lei, Beijing TS1 Contemporary Art Center, Beijing, China 2005 Pele da cidade: Imagens of Metropole Contemporanea, Galeria Tap Seac of Macau, Macau; traveled to Shenzhen Museum of Art, Guangdong, China

Conspire, Beijing TS1 Contemporary Art Center, Beijing, China (through 2006)

Art Nova of Gongbi Group Exhibition, Nanjing Dajia Gallery, Nanjing, China 2004 Photographs from Nanjing, Nanjing Art Museum, Nanjing, China

Dragon’s Nation: Contemporary Art of China, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

The First Nominative Exhibition of Fine Arts Literature, Art Gallery of Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, Wuhan, China

One to One: Visions-Recent Photographs from China, Chambers Fine Art, New York 2003 The Different Same: Contemporary Art Exchange Exhibition, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China 2002 Behind the Reality Other Modernity, Dimensions Art Center, Taipei, China

Paper/Colour, TaiKang Art Museum, Shanghai, China 2000 Exhibition of 5000 Years of Chinese Art and Civilization, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain

Exhibition of Shanghai Art Museum’s Collection, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai

Neo-Ink Paintings, Liuhaisu Art Museum, Shaingahi, China; traveled to Jiangsu Province Art Museum, Jiangsu, China

Chinese Contemporary Ink paintings and Sculpture, Pierre Cardin Center, Paris, France 1998 Exhibition of 5000 Years Of Chinese Art and Civilization, Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York 1996 Chinese Contemporary Art, International Art Garden Museum, Beijing, China 1989 China / Avant-Garde, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China 1985 Jiangsu Art Week of Youth / Great Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Jiangsu Provincial Art Museum, Nanjing, China 1984 The Sixth National Fine Arts Exhibition, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China

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P R I N T E D I N N E W YO R K B Y P R O J E C T G R A P H I C

COV E R :

Augmented Dream, 2015 Chinese ink and mineral on silk 60 5/8 x 106 1/4 in., 154 x 270 cm

ISBN: 978-0-89797-488-2

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XU LEI 徐 累

徐 累 NEW WORKS M AY 1 2 - J U N E 1 8 , 2 0 1 6

XU LEI

2016