Xu Lei

signed in Chinese, executed in 2013, framed

This work is generally in good condition. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light and out of its frame.
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Xu Lei was born in Nantong, Jiangsu Province in 1963, and graduated from Nanjing Art Academy, majoring in Chinese painting, and currently works at the Chinese National Academy of Arts. In the 1980s, he took part in the avant-garde movement in China known as the '85 New Wave. After a period of modernist conceptual practice, Xu began to retrace the value of Chinese artistic traditions in the 1990s, opening up a new individual creative path through a rich visual language of painting, and producing a successful example of reactivating traditional resources and establishing an individual value system.

Xu Lei's meticulous gongbi style painting follows traditional techniques and establishes a visual contextual relationship with the ancient classics. But his most significant contribution yet, has been his profound reading of Modern Art as a Chinese individual, a process realised by his independent thinking, which has reasserted the prototype of classical culture. His practice has transformed the rhetorical strategies of surrealism and creatively absorbed the influences of Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte and Yves Klein, as well as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, as he engages in the intellectual challenge between word and object. Yet at the same time, his subject matter is consistently linked to the decadent aesthetics and meditations on emptiness found in the Eastern perspective.

Xu Lei's idealism can be seen as a concealed form of ideological resistance. The emphasis on privacy, sensuality and illusion in his paintings alludes to an ontological force of aesthetics, radiating the allure of formalism—his well-known blue glaze horse imagery and the use of curtains and screens to divide space in the picture have become the marks of his individual language. In his recent large artworks, Xu has removed the sense of skill that marked his personal imagery in the past, and shifted towards the expression of simple, refined natural themes, thus highlighting the awareness of the vastness of the universe. The once closed spaces in his works have been opened up to become dialectical imaginings of inner and outer spaces, and have been elevated to a brighter and more beautiful poetic realm.

Within his body of work, Xu Lei has deconstructed the ossified formulae of ink and wash painting. With courage and wisdom, he has opened up a path to the modern world for the once deadlocked field of Chinese painting. The ink and wash practice of the younger generation is a testament to his accomplishments and influence, thus appropriately renowned as the founder of a painting style for his generation.