Solo Exhibition Upper Cloister, Aranya Jinshanling, Chengde
Xu Zhen is one of the most internationally influential artists from contemporary China. Working across installation, sculpture, performance, and other media, he has continually expanded the boundaries of Chinese conceptual art.
In recent years, Xu has turned his attention to new dialogues between the tradition of Chinese ink painting and contemporary artistic discourse. This body of work resonates with the architectural vision of Aranya Jinshanling Up Courtyard, where contemporary architectural forms create spaces imbued with the distilled spirit of Zen aesthetics.
This exhibition presents the latest works from Xu's "Planetary Shan Shui" and "Enlightenment" series. At a time when technology is fundamentally reshaping our perception of reality, the artist turns instead to ink painting as a traditional mode of understanding the world. Through a planetary perspective, he invites viewers to reconsider both the world and themselves, while asking what it means to exist in a state of inner freedom.
The shifting perspective of classical Shan Shui painting constructs space through multiple viewpoints, transforming a static landscape into an imagined realm that can be traversed and inhabited by the mind. Today, satellite remote sensing technologies similarly generate a mode of vision that appears to extend beyond the Earth itself, allowing users to remotely navigate, explore, and zoom through three-dimensional terrain via digital interfaces. Despite their different origins, both systems propose a perspective that transcends the scale of individual human experience.
In the Planetary Shan Shui series, Xu overlays these two visual systems through the traditional dian cun (dot-texturing) brush technique. Nature, once rendered into data, is transformed once again into a site of spiritual contemplation.
In Zen Buddhism, enlightenment is understood as a process of spiritual awakening, while Zen painting seeks to communicate states of mind through the act of painting itself. In the Enlightenment series, Xu depicts figures in meditation with seemingly effortless brushstrokes, pairing each work with titles resembling paradoxical contemporary conversations. By parodying the revelatory exchanges found in Zen kōans, he examines the tension between inner realization and social recognition, questioning how contemporary society continually produces, misreads, and consumes the pursuit of spirituality.
Rather than presenting these two series separately, the exhibition interweaves Planetary Shan Shui and Enlightenment, posing a central question: in an age of planetary technologies, how do we look back upon ourselves?
The exhibition is co-organised by Wu Yiyang, Associate Curator of Aranya Art Center, and He Liqun, Curatorial Assistant.
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