Su Xiaobai: The Elegance of Object

An intimate look at paintings, objects, and installations by one of the most intriguing personalities on the contemporary Chinese art scene; a survey of the artist’s oeuvre from 2007 to 2015. Su Xiaobai hails from a prominent generation of artists who left China in the wake of political and cultural experimentation in the 1980s. He adopted lacquer, a medium traditionally used by Chinese craftsmen, as his explorative means and fashioned a sensuous yet rigorous art practice that defies classification. Inspired but not constrained by Chinese artisanship and aesthetics, Su Xiaobai creates gargantuan compositions that speak, in a language informed by Western abstraction, the Buddhist mantra "All reality is a phantom; all phantoms are real." Luscious and mysterious, his body of work is defiantly sculptural yet exquisitely delivered―a constellation of extraordinary objects.