ART CITIES:Tokyo-Xu Ning

Xu Ning was born in 1979, in Beijing, China. She moved to Japan with her family in 2006 after graduating with a degree in oil painting from Capital Normal University in Beijing, and completed her doctoral degree program in painting at Tama Art University Graduate School in 2020. In the same year she was awarded the Grand Prix of Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2020. She currently lives and works in the Kanagawa prefecture.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Tomio Koyama Gallery Archive

Xu Ning’s solo exhibition “Season – Letter” focuses on a selection of new works replete with strength and passion including a large-scale painting measuring over 3-meters. In her practice, Xu has been greatly influenced by her encounters and discoveries of matters that transcend time, national borders, and genres, from the ancient thoughts of her native China, to the true to life reality of Netherlandish painting such as the works of Jan van Eyck, the decorativeness and innovation of Dolce & Gabbana’s fashion, the beauty of nature, and the ephemerality of life. Xu’s work illustrate her painstaking precision of painting fields of color and lines one by one upon a large canvas using a fine-point brush (a brush with an extremely thin and elongated tip). At the same time, she enables the coexistence of fortuity created through the splashing and dripping of paint, which together with the vividness of her palette as well as the contrast between the textured areas and flat white spaces, serve to generate a sense of dynamism and vigor. As the artist herself states, “for me, the reason why I paint is the same as the reason why I live”, her works reflect her unbreakable conviction in attempting to pursue who she is and what truth is through earnestly engaging with all sorts of affairs that permeate society. Furthermore, they are rich with emotion and convey various forms of love, as well as an endless sense of time that come to manifest through her meticulous accumulation of brushstrokes.  The title of this exhibition is eponymous to the title of the work that Xu Ning produced in the second year of her graduate studies at university. The work “Season – Letter” marked her first attempt in working with two conjoined large-scale canvases measuring approximately 2.6 x 1.9 meters each, with the size of the canvases themselves reflecting the vastness of nature. The artist mentions how the changes in the seasons have made her aware of the passage of time, encouraging her to question the meaning of human life, while at the same time instilling her with courage and moving her emotions. As such, she expresses a desire to convey its splendor to viewers in the way one would deliver a letter. Among the brilliantly vivid colors within Xu Ning’s work, her use of red is in particular most striking and impressive. Xu mentions that this is influenced by the fact of red being a color that represents auspiciousness in Wuxing (the Five Phases), which is a concept native to China where she was born and raised. In addition, in studies of religious paintings centering on Netherlandish painting, red is considered as a symbol of blood, and represents salvation and love.  Relative elements coexist within her work, such as East and West, abstraction and concreteness, delicacy and dynamism, elaborateness and fortuity, flat areas of the picture plane and the built-up texture of the paint, fields of color and blank white spaces, lines and colorfulness; creating a unique sense of balance and intensity. It is indeed possible to regard this as subconsciously having ties to the concept of Yin-Yang that forms a significant part of the philosophy of her homeland China. The concept of Yin and Yang, which was born in China, was introduced to Japan around the fifth and sixth centuries, after which it developed independently in its precept and interpretation. Xu, who was born and raised in China, expresses a love and affection for the rich nature of Japan, which considers as her second home, as well as the kindness of its people.

Photo: Xu Ning, Oil painting in history – Freedom, 2020, oil on canvas, 248.5 x 333.0 cm, © Xu Ning, Courtesy the artist and Tomio Koyama Gallery

Info: Tomio Koyama Gallery, complex665 2F, 6-5-24, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Duration: 23/1-20/2/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://tomiokoyamagallery.com