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Lot Essay
In the beginning of the 20th century, Lin Fengmian integrated the humanistic mood in traditional Chinese ink paintings into the cubism and expressionism that appeared in Western modernism and thus created a new era in art history. Lin visualised the titles of philosophical texts to bring metaphoric meanings to the animal themes in traditional Chinese bird-and-flower ink paintings. Xu Lei, on the other hand, as a pioneer of the new Chinese meticulous ink and contemporary ink paintings, sought out the moods and painting techniques of the Song and Ming dynasties. He pondered the concepts and structures of Chinese architecture and gardens. He also gained insights into modern art by reading the works of Western masters such as Ren? Magritte, Yves Klein and Marcel Duchamp. To confound preconceptions of 'dense and thin, dry and wet, black and white' in the viewer of Chinese ink paintings, Xu uses traditional mineral pigments and works on ripe rice paper or silk, enabling the viewer to notice the disappearance of classical layers and strokes.
Xu's large-scale work Cloud Dreams (Lot 435), executed in 2009, is an important piece employing his well-known blue glaze horse imagery. The blue and white horse has the texture of ancient porcelain and corresponds to the flowers and grass in the background, thus eliminating our pre-existing knowledge of horses. Here the horse, normally characterized by its savage vitality and galloping wildness, is simply and object of pure aesthetics, implying a sense of masochistic lust. The cloudy smoke that occupies the canvas adds a sense of drama to the work.
What is interesting for Xu is that the painter is free to adjust the relationships between images. Therefore, he indulges himself often in the world of nothingness, but full of a sense of existence; in this world, all the phenomena are waiting to be interpreted, all the elements presented on the image are like broken sentences in a poem waiting to be reassembled and form a new meaning. Xu brings objectively existing images into existence that relate to each other, which combined with nothingness forms the eternal sense of time and space. The images in this work are unrealistic and no more than tools for Xu. The viewer cannot help but see Xu's world in his way. Illusion and reality are always indecisively mixed in Xu's eyes; reality and illusion rely on each other and coexist in balance within one world. This idea is also a vital tradition in Chinese aesthetics.
Xu's large-scale work Cloud Dreams (Lot 435), executed in 2009, is an important piece employing his well-known blue glaze horse imagery. The blue and white horse has the texture of ancient porcelain and corresponds to the flowers and grass in the background, thus eliminating our pre-existing knowledge of horses. Here the horse, normally characterized by its savage vitality and galloping wildness, is simply and object of pure aesthetics, implying a sense of masochistic lust. The cloudy smoke that occupies the canvas adds a sense of drama to the work.
What is interesting for Xu is that the painter is free to adjust the relationships between images. Therefore, he indulges himself often in the world of nothingness, but full of a sense of existence; in this world, all the phenomena are waiting to be interpreted, all the elements presented on the image are like broken sentences in a poem waiting to be reassembled and form a new meaning. Xu brings objectively existing images into existence that relate to each other, which combined with nothingness forms the eternal sense of time and space. The images in this work are unrealistic and no more than tools for Xu. The viewer cannot help but see Xu's world in his way. Illusion and reality are always indecisively mixed in Xu's eyes; reality and illusion rely on each other and coexist in balance within one world. This idea is also a vital tradition in Chinese aesthetics.