XU Jin: Everything Has a Soul: Solo Exhibition

This winter, Don Gallery is honoured to present an extraordinary collection of paintings by New York-and-Hangzhou-based artist XU Jin, the pioneering member of China’s '85 New Wave and its “'85 New Space” exhibition who has persisted with the medium for more than four decades. In his first exhibition with Don Gallery, XU Jin depicts a series of interconnected subjects to construct composites of historical metaphors, mythical realities and perceptual illusions at a phenomenological level.

Through a pre-established language of landscaped forms, XU Jin transposes fragments from both individual and collective experience, also explores the evocative aggregates between the utopic and dystopic ideas about modern society. He redefines the confusing, incongruent episodes of human tragedies by enveloping the beholders within a particular weakness of the war-like conditions in mundane life. The confounding wilderness in his oeuvre goes beyond the range of existentialism, yet reinforcing the barbaric sadistic nature toward a culture of regression. His frequent reference to environmental contamination and terrorism issues calls forth the non-distanced gaze on the terrible twist of fate and its burden. The continuing significance of critical consciousness demonstrates itself as the point of departure for an integral path in XU Jin’s practice.

In the work entitled Everything Has a Soul, XU Jin painted a twilight zone of confusion. Seemingly of a no man’s land though, the dark scene actually embraces shadowy figures who trail along the edges, slip into the trails, stand in the closes, while the male stranger is posited in the midst as being exiled from the material world, who attempts to redeem himself. It is the outcome of the disorderly feeling of dwelling abroad. XU Jin dramatised the absurdity at the core of the present era and renders tribute to the unknown universe.

XU Jin was born in Huangyan, Zhejiang in 1958. He was admitted to the oil painting class at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Fine Arts) in 1977 and appointed to its faculty in 1985. He then became assistant to Bulgarian artist Maryn Varbanov and worked in his tapestry studio. During the mid and late 80s, he was actively involved in the avant-garde movement in China. Three of his early significant works— Introspection, The Conversation and Midnight—were exhibited in the “'85 New Space” exhibition in Hangzhou, which marked the starting point of his career. He moved to New York in 1989 and now owns studio in both cities. In 2018, Ningbo Museum of Art mounted XU Jin’s solo exhibition “Dialogue,” as a retrospective.