Artist from grasslands

Having been a teacher for almost half his life, Su Xinping, 40, is by no means talkative.
This quiet man from Jining of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region seems more eloquent expressing himself through his art, or, more exactly, through the mediums of print and oil painting.

His art serves as an introspective diary of his own life, and, above all, as a telling record of the precarious spiritual world of the Chinese people in a vibrant and rapidly changing contemporary society.

Now an associate professor and deputy director of the printmaking department of the Beijing-based Central Academy of Fine Arts, Su has been recognized as one of the most significant artists on the contemporary Chinese art scene for his highly individualized artistic expressions.

Su's early works, primarily woodprints and lithographs created in the 1980s, tell of his fire-and-ice relationship with the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, where he was born, raised and worked.

White horses, idle herdspeople, glaring sunshine, unfathomable skes and endless horizons dominate his works, which brim with heavenly tranquility and a shocking loneliness.

"I was so close to the grasslands," Su recalls, saying his quiet and pensive personality owes much to their endless spaces.

The idea of portraying the life of herdspeople on the grasslands first occurred to Su when he was serving in the army as a film projectionist in the late 1970s. His job allowed him to travel all over the grasslands and to get a feeling for the lives of local people.

However, it was many years after he took up art before he felt confident enough to translate his memories of life on the grasslands into images.

Upon finishing his army service, Su worked briefly in a cultural centre in his hometown and in 1979 went to study woodprinting at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.

He taught art at the Inner Mongolia Normal University for three years after graduating from the Tianjin school in 1983. It was then that he started to develop his own personal artistic style of printmaking.

He came to Beijing to continue his postgraduate studies in lithography, another method of printing from a design drawn directly onto a slab of stone or other suitable material, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

In those difficult days when he was trying to get used to life in the metropolis of Beijing, Su began to work on what would become his well-known lithographic series on the life and people of the grasslands. The works went beyond the vivid depiction of pastoral life on the grasslands to make discerning comments on city life.

His well-known lithograph "Sleeping Man, Departing Horse" (1988) was produced in this period.

The herdsman lying still on the ground contrasts evocatively with the horse walking away behind him and the work speaks eloquently of the lonely artist's experiences as he left his home in the grasslands and was confronted by the bafflingly different and indifferent city. The picture creates a strong atmosphere of nostalgia and hints at an anxiety about the future. Loneliness and tranquility are also present in the work.

"Su Xinping's depictions of the grasslands speak redolently of the inner rovings of his soul and he has made the grasslands rich with symbolic meanings," Beijing art critic Yin Jinan says.

His art represents a psychological world that has little to do with life on the grasslands, according to Yin.

Although the herdspeople in his works all wear Mongolian clothes, the paintings actually reflect life in the city, where people were lacking in spiritual communication.

Su's art was not widely recognized until 1989, when he graduated with a master's degree and became a teacher at China's top art school. That same year, his lithographic works were exhibited at the Chinese Modern Art Exhibition in Beijing and the Chinese Modern Prints Exhibition in Shanghai.

In the years that followed, his personal style, which is refined, clean, accurate and somber, has gradually matured. His works of art have been extensively exhibited and collected in China, the United States, Australia, Japan, Germany, Britain and Singapore.

Since 1992, Su's artistic language became more direct and penetrating in its treatment of the turbulence caused by rapid social transformation. Before then, he was basically observing things from a narrow, personal perspective and his art was no more than sleepwalking in a world irrelevant to others.

His art now serves more as a means of social criticism and he feels the artist should be more of a thinker.

As a result, city-life and urbanites, which he has now become quite familiar with, began to appear in his artwork.

His lithograph "Ancient Town" (1994) tells the story of Chinese society in the early 1990s, when the influence of popular culture and commercialization was great.

Images of noodle restaurants, McDonald's, entertainment centres and department stores make up an interesting and ridiculous blend in his work. The people in his pictures, still wearing Mongolian costumes, often take slanting or falling gestures, signalling an anxiety about the effect of various new fashions on traditional lifestyles in China.

"Chinese artists like me are lucky to be able to experience such vibrant transformations," Su said. "It is natural for an artist to be sensitive to social change and to create art as an individual comment on the world around him."

Su says his art was rejuvenated during a half-year stay in the United States as a visiting artist in 1993, which exposed him to the varied trends of Western modern and contemporary visual arts.

"I realized that what is essential in art are concepts, rather than techniques and methods. It's necessary for a real artist to create something that his predecessors have never been able to do before, that is, something concerning his own times," Su said.

As such, Su quietly took up oil painting in 1995, although he has not given up lithography, at which he is a master.
To the envy of many oil painters, Su handles the new media well. The refinement and accuracy that marked his previous lithographic works can still be found in his oil paintings. What he adds are intense colours and, above all, a freedom of artistic expressions, unshackled by a strict academic training in oil painting.

Oils have greatly expanded his artistic domain and he has now built up an international reputation as a successful printmaker and oil painter.

Su's recent oil painting series, "Sea of Desire" (1996), is distinctive for an ironic and brisk flavour, which is quite different from the tranquil and introspective nature in his early prints about the life and people on the grasslands.

The people represented in this series, primarily urban Chinese, are painted in exaggerated shapes, tense and anxious. They rush to, plunge in, or swim in the sea of desire where they eagerly struggle for money, power and fame. The works reflect the frantic state of mind of some Chinese people during the country's periods of reform and modernization.

In his most recent oil paintings, such as "Holiday" (2000), the artist leads viewers to ponder the uncertainty and fragility of family ties in modern China, which is a new social problem.

"Su Xinping is not the type of painter who likes to show off and is always dreaming of 'explosive' effects. His works of art do not appear to be 'avant-garde' either. Rather, he is always clear about his own ideas and is constantly developing his own conceptual realm," said Gao Minglu, an art critic and curator in the United States.

"He has involved himself thoroughly in the currents of his time," Gao said.

Date: 08/08/2000
Author: YANG YINGSHI, China Daily staff
Copyright? by China Daily

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