“Art is the ideal of craftsmanship – the product of craftsmanship is something tangible, an object.The product of art is a higher object that contains an ideal, which means something that exists outside of the physical exterior.”1

　　Interest in China and Chinese contemporary painting has been booming abroad more or less  since the late 1990s2. China with its incredible dynamism seems to reinvent itself each day anew. Instead of cultivating traditions and heritage sites, the Chinese are tearing down entire historic old-towns in their burgeoning cities. The old must make way for the future – modern skyscrapers and shiny new quarters. Permanent tabula rasa, an iconoclasm played out in an endless loop – that is how it was denounced by the artist Ai Weiwei through his 2007 installation “Template” at the documenta 12 in Kassel, which made quite an impact on the public3. The development of society in this socialist country, with the struggle for survival between tradition and turbo capitalism, is a theme being explored at all cultural levels. An example in literature is Jiang Rong’s crypto-fascist novel “Wolf Totem”, which was on the Chinese bestseller lists for months4. And in art, much of what currently counts abroad as Chinese contemporary painting also deals – ironically and satirically – with this struggle for survival. It does this either in a way that is considered critical of the regime and society or in carefree, neutral and colourful, indeed orientalising, way. For art is always in part an echo of existing society. On the other hand, this – admittedly successful – trend in contemporary Chinese painting, which is largely market-oriented, conveys – through its domestic and foreign channels of reception – a rather misleading picture of the real state of art production in China.

　　This distortion is possible because contemporary painting beyond the major metropolitan centres like Beijing, Guangzhou or Shanghai has not reached a wide audience in China itself, where in any case modern art does not enjoy a popularity comparable with the European scene. So it is not surprising that there are many currents of painting, with a diversity of styles, that have remained virtually unknown to the public in the non-Chinese world. A closer look at the less familiar works offers no déjà-vu for Western eyes. We cannot consider these pictures to be in any way mere epigones of past styles from the history of Western art. As Gao Minglu, curator of the recent exhibition “Yi Pai – Century Thinking” (2009) at the Today Art Museum in Beijing, confirms, the massive dominance of commercial criteria in the selection of artists distorts our understanding of what is happening in China. He and other art critics are therefore keen to counterpose alternatives from the context of Chinese art history to the concepts from Western art theory, which also dominate in China. Above all, he wants to pursue a line of Chinese art criticism that can remain independent of market interests: “Art remains pointless as long as it is based on clichés driven by the market.”5 And there is no doubt that alternatives can be sought among the existing, stylistically divergent currents that exist in contemporary Chinese art.

　　One of those artists who think outside the categories of the market-oriented mainstream and whose work do not follow “market-driven clichés” is the Chinese-German artist Xiaobai Su. Even within the diverse art scene of his native country he represents an extremely individualistic position, and his work helps to confirm the claims of those renowned art critics who declare that in the new millennium Chinese contemporary painting has definitely caught up with the international art scene.

　　Born in 1949 in Wuhan and, as a teenager, influenced by the Cultural Revolution, Xiaobai Su underwent an initial craft apprenticeship before going on to study painting until 1987 at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. A graduate scholarship enabled him to move to Germany to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He took the master class of his mentor Konrad Klapheck until 1992, after which he continued living and working in Germany as an independent artist. He even took out German citizenship in 1998, but decided in 2006 to return to his native China and live with his family in Shanghai.

　　Organised and funded by public broadcaster ZDF together with the Langen Foundation, the “Xiaobai Su – The Dynasty of Colours” exhibition takes place first in Mainz and then in Neuss. It presents a direction in painting that at first glance has little to do with the widespread cliché of a “Chinese” contemporary painter. The work is not figurative, it does not convey any episodes or stories, it contains no orientalisms with allusions to calligraphy, no Concept Art and certainly no compositions reminiscent of Socialist Realism coupled with elements of American Pop Art. Nor do these paintings playfully alter and defamiliarise objects iconic of Chinese culture in order to reference the problem of finding a harmony between tradition and modernity6.

　　Xiaobai Su goes his own way, resolutely painting his calm, aesthetically balanced compositions. His paintings neither disclose his Chinese origins in a direct way, nor do they appear to express or connote any kind of obviously critical stance towards social developments in China.

　　The history of oil painting in China, a tradition which took off between 1906 and 1918 with the founding of the first arts schools for oil painting, has – with a certain time lag – some interesting parallels with the personal path followed by Xiaobai Su. He set off for Düsseldorf in 1987 and, in the following years, cast off the patterns of thought and art forms he had previously acquired. After a period of inner meditation in which he became “something of a recluse7”, he found his way to the very individual style that now characterises his work. At roughly the same time, Chinese contemporary art was also taking new directions with the emergence of the “New Wave” – characterised by art expert Andreas Schmid8 as a “renaissance”, due to its strong connection with philosophy and its proximity to Western existentialism. Reorientation and renewal were therefore slogans with which Xiaobai Su also found himself personally confronted in Germany.

　　In many of the writings by Chinese art experts on Xiaobai Su we always find a persistent attempt to set his work in the context of his Chinese origins, emphasising the role of his training at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. In the East, the critics argue – largely from a position of misplaced national pride – that this is a painter who had clearly already made his mark in the art scene before leaving China and, after further training in the West, must have drawn on the profound insights he had taken with him and continues to project these insights as – of course! – a Chinese artist with Chinese ideas.
Xiaobai Su himself mentions in an interview with Baixi9 how disturbed he felt when, early on in Germany, he suddenly realized that some collectors only appreciated his pictures because of the “Chineseness” they thought they could discern in them.

　　In the West, the art scene was at first largely ignorant of modern Chinese artists and generally interpreted the new works through clichés. In Germany, too, there was little or no understanding of the 1980s artist generation, although a greater awareness arose from the late 1990s. However, interest has centred on the “market leaders” promoted by national and international art dealers. Most new Chinese artists are probably little better understood by the wider public even today. Chinese painting is still generally associated above all with figurative work. Western reception is based on popular expectations of motifs of an iconography regarded as specifically Chinese10.

　　But it was precisely this dilemma that Xiaobai Su wanted to overcome as an artist. His path was to seek a profound universal concept of art and to understand and live this art without any regard to national peculiarities and categories. In a sense, he wanted to create a “third space”.

　　It is interesting to note that Xiaobai Su, through his “rebirth” in Germany, embraced with absolute rigor an abstract direction in his painting. This was a style that occupied very much a minority position within China after 1989, leaving aside its main representatives Ding Yi and Shen Fan11, who also happen to be based in Shanghai, the place Xiaobai Su made his new home upon his return to China in 2006.

　　So, even if a certain tendency toward abstraction might already be apparent in some of his early works painted (and acclaimed!) in China12, the artist only became consistently abstract after the German phase of personal “reinvention”. However, we have to qualify this observation on his turn to abstract art by pointing out that Xiaobai Su’s paintings do not really fit into the categories of art history. Abstract painting is generally equated with non-figurative, non-representational or “objectless” art. “Objectless” refers here to the absence of any quasi-natural composition or forms derived from nature. But the essence of abstraction is more than this, for it also means that one filters out, within the visual presentation, those levels – including levels of thought – that make the work identifiable in the sense of a single-track interpretation.

　　Xiaobai Su paints his abstract works without any references to, or abbreviations of, quasi-natural representations. But his works are certainly not “objectless” in a wider sense, because he makes colours, textures and surfaces the actual objects of his pictures. Simply the existence of colours and textures makes his pictures “real”. Through his commitment to the act of painting, he invests the work with emotion and individual personality. But the emotion in Xiaobai Su’s paintings is not of the eruptive, volcanic kind, but inward-looking and meditative – self-restraint rather than abstract expressionism, sparingness rather than minimalism.

　　The simple, generous and calm shapes and surfaces follow a structural order that is carefully conceived, quite different from concrete geometric patterns or the primacy of line. Xiaobai Su neither wants to convey associations in a defining manner, nor treat the colours purely as a means of expression. Rather, he understands colour as something autonomous, as a concrete visual form. Colours and rhythm within the picture are sufficient in their own terms.

　　Moreover, the pictures, which may at first seem almost monochromatic but are actually exceptionally rich in colours, convey a contingent sense of depth. This creates a third dimension that is further heightened by the effect of overlaid strips of canvas and multiple layers of lacquer and counterposed to each other with great finesse. This evokes a formal tension based on contrasts: empty, almost flat areas are placed opposite uneven patches of manifold elevations and depressions, the surface effects often accentuated by contrasting colours flashing out from the ground layers.

　　Seemingly “monochromatic” pictures with their random arrangements of sprinkled colours and revealed layers of under-painting are then structured by verticals that impose order. The ordering elements, consisting of lines and bars, performs here a rhythmic function similar to that of punctuation marks in grammar or bar lines in a stave of music. The colours as bearers of emotion are a transporting medium, much like notes in music. Colours are, of course, a sensual part of our world. For each individual they are deeply subjective in reception and effect. In these pictures, colours achieve special structure and dynamism thanks to the flowing properties of the raw lacquer employed by the artist – which Xiaobai Su expressly does not wish to be seen as a link with his artistic origins, even though lacquer work may be generally associated with China. This fluidity has its own dynamism, bringing the colours to life and making them autonomous, indeed the very subject of the picture.

　　This makes the emotion which the artist paints into and puts into the work – his mode of working13  – so crucial, as Xiaobai Su has himself emphasised. And this emotion becomes almost physically tangible for an observer who really engages with the work. We can feel its power emanating from the colours and textures on the canvas. Recognising or not recognising what one sees is a question of conscious observation. This makes a picture a matter of opinion or, literally, “a matter of one’s view”. This term clearly points to a dual meaning: “view” as simply a process of seeing, but also “view” in the sense of having an understanding or “grasping”. And, again, “grasping” evokes the haptic dimensions of the paintings. In fact, some of his pictures have such pastose and literally multilayered lacquer applications that we want to touch the work, get closer to it with our hands and our eyes at the same time.

　　After we have begun to find our way into the pictures, we notice their titles. In this respect, Xiaobai Su prefers a short and concise designation. He does not always stick to the type of title that simply states the paints used but, for certain pictures, chooses titles that have a specific historical Chinese context or describe universally valid modes of human behaviour. With regard to a painter’s choice of a title for his work, it should be remembered that his world of ideas always revolves around the context in which he happens to be working. It should also be borne in mind that the title for a picture begins to form in the painter’s mind during the actual process of painting – it grows out of the picture. The picture is never determined by the title! So titles are merely indications of what moved the painter while painting and what associations he had. Although they may offer an insight into an underlying mood, they ultimately have their origin in the colours and in the creative process. And Xiaobai Su succeeds in creating almost “telluric” illustrations, as visitors to the exhibition can see for themselves.

　　Pictures like “Antique Battlefield I-II” or “The Origin”14 evoke landscapes through the almost playful application of paint to create slightly raised cipher-like shapes – landscapes in which the past has left traces of life and death. Their real existence can only be perceived as a feeling rather than recognised spatially. In Western painting, a comparable attitude toward pure painting, colour and colour composition can be seen in Antoni Tàpies – note that I am speaking here of “attitude” and not comparing the painters’ techniques.

　　It is also Tàpies who once said, “Art is like a game; only in a state of innocence […] do we grasp its deeper sense.”15 And this state of innocence has been reached by Xiaobai Su when he reports that he “shook off” the artistic patterns of thought he had previously learnt and moved on to find his present highly individual style. This demanded that he took a totally new approach and developed an autonomous understanding of art with parameters that were new to him. Gao Minglu very accurately characterises the new stance as a “Reserve Philosophy”.16 What Xiaobai Su is currently painting is a distancing, i.e. a distancing from the object – from image and content, as he embraces the components that manifest the art work.

　　An artist who lives and works in an alien culture brings with him his own background and learning and must engage with a new and very different set of conditions and teachings. His situation has, at least temporarily, a “dipolar character”, from which various strategies are open to the artist as he seeks resolution. One tendency is for him to remain wedded to the art that is intrinsic to his origins and work by, in a sense, looking back. Here, the new ideas will ultimately always remain alien, and he will remain a foreigner in a foreign country. On the other hand, he can engage unreservedly with the totally new art. But the danger here is that the artist will completely negate his own identity, which can be personally problematic. Or an artist can follow a course like the one pursued by Xiaobai Su, although very few have succeeded. He adopts a cautious, quiet, renunciative position, stepping back from himself and his previous life, but also keeping a certain distance from the new culture surrounding him. In this way, he observes both worlds from the outside. Taking a middle path, he seeks the best from both cultures, with the aim and conviction that ultimately only the macroworld of things, the substance and the essence will last.

　　We can scientifically and technically dissect the world around us or a picture in front of us. We can try to describe and interpret it with words. We can materialise things – and yet we do not catch their essence, because you cannot fix or own transcendence. Through our subjectivity, we reduce, define in language or categorise painting in terms of the currents identified by art history.

　　Reduction to the essence is a kind of “language” that is ultimately shared by everyone, whatever their culture. Living deep within us, this “language” is universally understood. Xiaobai Su’s art does not convey existential sensibilities or abstracting images of the real world, nor does it descend into the purely decorative. Rather, Xiaobai Su confronts us with “counter-images” in which the intrinsic value of the medium colour “speaks” for itself. This is the “Dynasty of Colours” – the dynastic, the ruling function of colours, the function that is important for Xiaobai Su the man and artist, not for Xiaobai Su the Chinese or the German!

　　Through his painting, Xiaobai Su catches our eye, reaches our heart and, above all, grabs our attention. For him, the interactive relationship between art work, observer and artist is important because it ennobles the creativity he regards as craftsmanship, allows us as observers sufficient space for our own reception and interpretation and, in this way, makes the art work truly universal in the sense that everyone can understand it.

　　“Really great works are created in the relationship between the artist and his entire life.” Here, Xiaobai Su formulates with deliberate modesty something universally valid, rather than making reference to his own work. In his work, however, this relationship is abundantly clear.

　　<1> El Lissitzky (1890-1941), quoted in: Proun and Wolkenbügel, eds. Lissitzky-Küppers/J. Lissitzky, Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1977, p. 13.

　　<2> Two retrospective exhibitions were held in 1989 that dealt with the development of Chinese contemporary painting in the last ten years, presenting a fairly broad spectrum: a smaller show in January 1989 in both Hong Kong and Taipei entitled “The Stars (Xin Xin) 10 Years” and a larger, more important exhibition in February 1989 in Beijing called “China /Avant-Garde”, which was curated inter alia by Gao Minglu. Until that time, the foreign art world had – with a few exceptions – taken little notice of this work. The German media was only interested in the closing down of the latter exhibition by the authorities in response to a provocative art action. After 1989, and the protests on the Tiananmen Square in Beijing, there followed roughly two years of repression during which a number of important older artists and curators emigrated. The Tiananmen experience made the new generation of Chinese artists emerging around 1989 less idealistic than their predecessors. They tended to concentrate on their personal sensibilities, producing ironic and individualistic work. In terms of style, the paintings were full of references to Socialist Realism, often infused with colourful elements of Pop Art of the American tradition (“Cynical Pop”). With the removal, in the early 1990s, of restrictions on urban migration, cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou or Beijing became burgeoning metropolitan centres. Their international importance was partly due to the growing numbers of foreigners. Some large exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art were held abroad from 1989, introducing the artists and art works to a Western audience and raising their public profile. There were shows in France, England, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Hong Kong, the USA, and Australia.
A particularly important event in Germany was the 1993 exhibition in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (“China / Avant-Garde”, which went on to tour the Netherlands, Denmark and England) and the “China!” exhibition at the same place in 1997. After 1993, the Chinese artists became increasingly popular exhibitors at shows and biennials. From the mid-1990s, more and more art dealers began including these artists in their programme and leading Western galleries established offshoots in China. As art insider Andreas Schmid has said, “…by the end of the 1990s Chinese art had arrived on the international scene … although the main creative stimuli in China came again and again from Chinese in exile.” (Andreas Schmid in: “Der lange Marsch”, Artnet Magazin 19.8.2008).

　　<3> Manfred Schwarz in: “Chinas Kunst, schick der Zukunft zugewandt”, Die Welt 01.04.2008.

　　<4> Niklas Maak in: “Was sagt uns Chinas Kunst?”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26.07.2008.

　　<5> Quote from Gao Minglu on the homepage of “History of Arts and Architecture” of the University of Pittsburgh.

　　<6> Last seen in an exhibition entitled “Ai Weiwei: So sorry” in the Haus der Kunst, Munich (12.10.2009 - 17.1.2010).

　　<7> Xiaobai Su in his interview with Baixi in the present catalogue, p.142 ff.

　　<8> A. Schmid in: “Ein großes Versprechen – Zur Eröffnung des Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing”, Artnet Magazin 21.1.2008.

　　<9> In the present catalogue, p. 142 ff.

　　<10> What counts as “typically Chinese” are, for example, themes from the Mao era, critiques of the new consumer society, reference to Chinese traditions and their difficult relationship with modernity, and of course calligraphic reductions and orientalisms. Here cf. Birgit Hoepfner in: “Verschobene Mitte – Zur Rezeption und Konstruktion der chinesischen Gegenwartskunst”, Artnet Magazin 15.7.2008.

　　<11> However, it is important to add here that, leaving aside the early years, these painters’ abstract work has since taken a different, essentially more Concept Art-oriented direction than the art represented by Xiaobai Su.

　　<12> The art critic Jia Fangzhou sees, for instance, early signs of underlying analytical-abstract elements in “Da Niang Jia”, a picture Xiaobai Su displayed in 1984 at the 6th National Art Exhibition in Beijing.

　　<13> On the concept of “lacquer painting” and the painter‘s understanding of art as craftsmanship, cf. the article on “Kao Gong Ji“ by Gao Minglu in this catalogue, p. 38 ff.

　　<14> Cat. no 31, 39 and 43.

　　<15> Antoni Tàpies: Die Praxis der Kunst, Erker Verlag, St. Gallen 1976, p. 186.

　　<16> p. 38 ff.  Gao Minglu is a professor of history of art at the University of Pittsburgh. He emigrated in 1989 from China, where he came to prominence as the curator of the “China / Avant-Garde” exhibition in Beijing, to the United States for political reasons. Over the last decade he has again been working in China, increasingly taking on curating assignments, most recently in 2009 for the pioneering show “Yi Pai – Century Thinking” at the Today Art Museum, Beijing.