Blue and White Horse

細節

XU LEI (B. 1963)
Blue and White Horse
Scroll, mounted and framed
Ink and colour on paper
63.5 x 97.5 cm. (25 x 38 3/8 in.)
Executed in 2002

來源

Directly acquired by the present owner from the artist in 2006.

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XU LEI (B. 1963)
Selected exhibitions
2008 Asian Division of the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA (solo)
National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China (group)
National Gallery, Berlin, Germany (group)
2007 Hong Kong City Hall, Hong Kong (group)
2004 Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (group)
Nanjing Art Museum, China (group)
2000 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (group)
1998 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (group)
1997 Browse & Darby Gallery, London (solo)
1994 Jiangsu Province Art Museum, Nanjing, China (solo)

Xu Lei was born in Nantong, Jiangsu Province in 1963. He was trained at the Nanjing Art Academy and became a resident painter at the Jiangsu Institute of Chinese Painting upon graduation. Xu was an active participant in the New Wave movement and his work was exhibited in the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition in Beijing in 1989.
Xu's choice of colour palette strikes viewers in their first impression. With refined and restrained gongbi technique, Xu portrays his subject, often animals, in a realistic manner, set against mysterious backdrops such as water, curtain and screen. He constructs a fantastical spatial dimension that gives a domestic and estranged context, alluring viewers to imagine the relationship between the subject and its surrounding. For Xu what appeals to him is "how to make a game out of cerebral, rhetorical relations among pictorial figures". This treatment reminds viewers the works by surrealist painters where the seen and unseen are equally intriguing to one's eyes.

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拍品專文

Horses are common motif in the traditional Chinese painting genre, but no artist has chosen the conundrum of colours and symbols as Xu Lei, who bravely developed his unique artistic language as unmistakably Chinese, yet with fascination in Western medieval art, surrealism, and conceptualism. A seemingly simplistic composition consisting of the sky, a quiet body of water, and a white horse, Blue and White Horse evokes both tranquillity and bewilderment. With a strong influence by Song dynasty painting, Xu renders the horse using gongbi technique in a realistic manner. Deprived of its original symbolic meaning of energy and vitality, the horse stands still in the water and is transformed into a somewhat inanimate aesthetic object with a blue and white pattern on its back. For Xu, this pattern is not merely a symbol of oriental culture. In many artist's statements and interviews, he relates this porcelain decorating technique to tattoo, which is a device to call to mind memories and experiences. Resembling a staged act, the composition is typical of Xu's oeuvre where concealment plays an important role in the interaction between the artist and the viewer. The estranged relationship between the various elements and the many unanswered questions regarding their co-existence endow the painting with mystery that lies beyond this beautiful facade.

Blue and White Horse

拍品專文

更多來自 中國當代水墨

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