A comprehensive look at paintings, objects, and installations by one of the most prominent artists on the Chinese contemporary art scene through a rich visual documentation surveying the artist’s oeuvre from 2007 to 2015. One of the most prestigious artists in Chinese contemporary art, Su Xiaobai is among a generation of legendary artists who left China in the 1980s. He adopts lacquer, a medium steeped in Chinese history, as his aesthetic means, and has developed a sensuous yet rigorous art practice that defies classification. He has garnered international fame as his work appears in museum collections in China, Taiwan, Germany, and the U.S. and is exhibited at galleries across the globe from France to China. Driven by Chinese tradition, Xiaobai creates intriguing and magnificent work that speaks a Western language of visual abstraction with the Buddhist mantra “All reality is a phantom, and all phantoms are real” as its core. Luscious and mysterious, his body of work is defiantly sculptural yet exquisitely delivered—a constellation of extraordinary objects.
With a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a position as research professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, Gao Minglu is a renowned critic, curator, and scholar of Chinese contemporary art since the mid-1980s. Benjamin Alexander is a philosopher and art critic.
