Su Xinping

Private Collection, New York

Su Xinping's Art, Beijing, 2003, no. 132, illustated in color

These three paintings are all in very good condition overall. There are no visible condition problems with any of them. Not examined under UV light.
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The renowned printmaker and painter Su Xinping was born in 1960 in Jining, Inner Mongolia; in 1977 he entered the Army. Six years later, after graduating from the Painting Department at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, Su returned to Mongolia and became an instructor in the department of fine arts at the Inner Mongolia Normal University.  In 1989 he graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing with a master's degree in printmaking. Su has been associated with printmaking department at CAFA since then and is now the chair of the department.  After creating a large body of graphic work depicting life in Mongolia, Su turned increasingly to painting from the late 1980s, depicting the seismic shifts underway in contemporary Chinese society. Su's inward, often brooding paintings allegorize modern life without romanticizing it - his self portraits and pictures of vagrants display a sharp awareness of the struggle to remain whole in a China where fundamental changes occur almost overnight.  Su's stark visions of people made vulnerable by the changing context evince an empathetic understanding of their isolation and sense of dislocation.

Inside and Outside the Room (2002, Lot 225) is a huge triptych measuring two by almost four meters.  In each image a man sits before a window as various scenes take place in the world beyond.  The man in the left panel looks away, seemingly in resignation, while through the window we see two women walking small dogs beneath a red sun.  In the center panel a man seated on a bed stares balefully back at the viewer; in the background, a man and woman pictured in profile appear to be conversing, set amidst two rows of red flags, again under a red sun.  In the panel at right, a man sitting on his haunches impassively holds a cigarette, a cup perhaps used as an ashtray beside him.  Beyond this enigmatic figure, a man and woman raise a toast under the glow of the red sun. The contrast between the darker interiors and lighter atmosphere outside the windows is depicted straightforwardly but charged with emotional resonance, in keeping with the disaffected features of the men and the melancholic tone of the work as a whole.  Here Su seems to register a sort of introspective regret, hidden away in private lives and in contrast to the more interactive public life of the exterior world.

In Cheers (2003, Lot 227) two groups of three men aligned along either side of a dining table offer a toast over the floral arrangement and unspecified dish with which the table is prepared.  Frozen in their action, the men enact a scene of politesse seen again and again in the restaurants of China, in which diners rise to greet or praise a participant in the party.  Su is particularly interested in recording the rituals of contemporary, post-Mao China, in which the individual counts for more than he or she once did but becomes socially and psychologically vulnerable for exactly that reason. Painted in reddish orange tones, the imagery is oddly unsettling, perhaps because of the uniformity of the revelers, which the narrow chromatic range underscores.  

Like many artists of his generation, Su Xinping is preoccupied by the tension between the new-found individualism of today's China and the unshakable resonance of collectivism instilled by the still-recent past.  Su tends to go further than his peers, however, in disclosing the psychological ramifications of this profound transformation upon the individual.

-Jonathan Goodman