Tang Contemporary Art is honored to announce the representation of artist Xu Jiang within the Asian region. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, titled “One Hill, One Valley”, will open on July 27 at the Hong Kong Central Space. As Xin Qiji says, “even one hill and one valley can be a charm.” The exhibition shows 30 of Xu’s latest works revolving around landscapes, conveying the artist’s travelling horizons, and spiritual endeavors towards traditional Chinese landscapes.

 

The Image of Hills and Valleys

 

In the past two years, Xu has begun painting the landscape of Jiangnan, while also resigning from his position as the President of the China Academy of Art. Despite still being busy, he finally has time to experience the sublime of hills and valleys. The mountains in Jiangnan are not high, yet they are exquisite. Yandang, Tiantai, Longquan, Fuchun River...many great masters were infatuated with them, inspired to leave behind many famous works. What Xu Jiang paints are precisely these mountains in Jiangnan: “Zhushan”, “Taishan”, “Quanshan”, and “Yashan”, they are not just mountains belonging to Jiangnan but are also the spiritual peak that Chinese painters and scholars uphold, like what Fan Kuan had expressed in Travellers Among Mountains and Streams during the Northern Song Dynasty.

 

Xu Jiang’s new works are titled “landscape”, not “scenery”. In fact, he has never been a scenery painter. From painting cityscapes to the Sunflower Garden series, he has always been more interested in depicting the “Xiang” (imagery) – that is how the artist and the painted subject interact to produce a picture, which is also an important notion belonging to the spirituality in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. In a landscape, one not only observes but also experiences, walking through each hill and valley while integrating personal experience with the landscape. Thus, hidden behind the depicted surface of each landscape is its true essence of spirituality – expressed poetically as of the longstanding tradition of landscape painting in China. Interestingly, one may also find Xu’s emphasis on spirituality to resemble German Romanticists’ pursuit of morality and spirituality via the painting medium, which may be attributed to Xu’s history of studying in Germany in the late 1980s.

 

“One Hill, One Valley” is the title that Xu Jiang gave for the exhibition, which comes from a famous poem by Song poet and painter Huang Tingjian, “one hill, one valley, can drag along the tail.” In ancient Chinese language, “dragging the tail” is an idiom coming from the idea that turtles can wiggle their tail freely despite being situated in the mud, thus later connoting the life of secluded literati, who remains joyful and noble in a difficult setting of reclusion. The landscapes in Xu’s painting – the hills and the valleys – are hence naturally also pleasures of seclusion.

 

If the array of Sunflower Garden that Xu Jiang has painted in the past represents the spirituality of him and his generation of scholars, then these latest creations of landscapes have detached the distinct historical feeling that belonged to Sunflower Garden, becoming like a melodious string piece that resonates with both the contemporary and the eternity. As we trace the mountainous path and gaze afar, “it is certainly enough to make the mountains and rivers intertwine with history.”

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Wu Hao

June 2023         Shanghai