XU JIANG

Xu Jiang is primarily recognised as a landscape painter, unlike other artists who specialise in either cityscape or natural scenery. Xu Jiang’s penchant for the cultural and historical richness of the city finds vivid expressions in his painting. His cityscapes, with compelling images of skylines, streets and buildings, recall a tragedy or epic. The cityscapes have moved beyond the representational, and although the subject matter may vary, the artist poses similar intellectual questions. What he paints becomes a meta-landscape, revealing his spiritual, intellectual, and cultural concerns. Compared to cityscapes, Xu Jiang’s painting of natural scenes conveys a sense of liveliness and spontaneity. Xu Jiang’s bigger compositions often consist of a group of small-scale sequential paintings in order to involve the temporal and the spatial elements. It is a way to reflect the artist’s perception of the world or the image of the mind. His response to the crisis of painting and the rise of media-art, is to create a fruitful dialogue between the traditional and the new media.

Courtesy Tina Keng Gallery