Group Exhibition Zhuzhong Collection, Beijing
Text: Yang Jie
Bao Xiaowei, Wei Jia, Xu Hongxiang and Zong Ning all received rigorous, orthodox academic training. Yet through their practice, they have forged paths that depart from convention, imbuing both their work and their personas with a spirit of non-compromise. This quality manifests variously: Wei Jia’s shift from figuration to abstraction in painting; Xu Hongxiang’s trajectory from anti-traditional approaches back to easel painting; Bao Xiaowei positioning himself on-site amid unfolding social events; and the undercurrent of emotion surging beneath the visceral impact of Zong Ning’s photographic works.
Life is not cinema. Save for rare strokes of fate, it seldom unfolds with neatly structured beginnings, developments, twists and resolutions. The same holds true for artists: art is their vocation. And like any familiar profession, sustaining practice and achieving progress over a decade is no small feat.
The four artists featured in this exhibition have embraced this challenge, experimenting relentlessly for years. In the decade following graduation, they continuously searched for their own expressive language — spanning materials and forms, concepts and actions. Gradually, they carved out creative trajectories that break down entrenched boundaries. The works on view are fragmented excerpts harvested from their ongoing experiments.
Like their peers, they carry life’s joys and anxieties, clarity and confusion. Their reflections emerge as song in moments of delight, as outcry amid suffering; much as novelists write fiction and poets compose verse, they channel thought via painting, photography and other mediums.
From this perspective, they are no different from ordinary people. Some of their inquiries revolve around the intrinsic language of art, while others stem from universal human emotion shared by us all: the quest to affirm individual identity within collective society.
The bravado and disillusionment of youth are no mere illusion. Phrases such as “everything has changed” serve dramatic narrative purposes. For most people, reality consists of routine, day-to-day existence. Art born out of such lived experience can only slowly build something new through persistent dismantling of what already exists.
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