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Lot 841
XU LEI (B. 1963)
Coloured Rocks
Closed27 November 2017
Price Realised
HKD 500,000
More Information
Specialist note
"Emptiness goes together with substance and truth with fantasy. Reality and illusion are one world: the two underlie and engender each other. The give and take is spontaneous."
- Xu Lei
Xu Lei was born in Nantong, Jiangsu Province in 1963. He was trained at the Nanjing Art Academy and became a resident painter at the Jiangsu Institute of Chinese Painting upon graduation. Xu was an active participant in the New Wave movement and his work was exhibited in the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition in Beijing in 1989.
Xu’s choice of colour palette strikes viewers in their first impression. With refined and restrained gongbi technique, Xu portrays his subject, in a realistic manner, set against mysterious backdrops such as water, curtain and screen. He constructs a fantastical spatial dimension that gives a domestic and estranged context, alluring viewers to imagine the relationship between the subject and its surrounding. For Xu what appeals to him is “how to make a game out of cerebral, rhetorical relations among pictorial figures”. This treatment reminds viewers the works by surrealist painters where the seen and unseen are equally intriguing to one’s eyes.
- Xu Lei
Xu Lei was born in Nantong, Jiangsu Province in 1963. He was trained at the Nanjing Art Academy and became a resident painter at the Jiangsu Institute of Chinese Painting upon graduation. Xu was an active participant in the New Wave movement and his work was exhibited in the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition in Beijing in 1989.
Xu’s choice of colour palette strikes viewers in their first impression. With refined and restrained gongbi technique, Xu portrays his subject, in a realistic manner, set against mysterious backdrops such as water, curtain and screen. He constructs a fantastical spatial dimension that gives a domestic and estranged context, alluring viewers to imagine the relationship between the subject and its surrounding. For Xu what appeals to him is “how to make a game out of cerebral, rhetorical relations among pictorial figures”. This treatment reminds viewers the works by surrealist painters where the seen and unseen are equally intriguing to one’s eyes.