When I came into Xu’s studio in Hangzhou early this spring, I noticed a great contrast between the scene indoors and the splendid outdoor scenery. Disordered as any other artist’s studio, Xu’s studio was covered with layers and layers of dust and history, on the wall, on the floor, and also on his heavy and solid easel. There were the paint stains the artist left when he was soaked in his practice; day after day, it became his painting race, interpreting mutually with the on-going series. This series is entitled Twelve Views of a Sunflower Garden, which is about the luxuriant or withering state of sorghum crops. The unfinished picture, with strokes of great ease, showed the artist’s usual inspiring and free style. Xu mentioned the word “pain” while speaking of the intention of the artistic practice. This word not only referred to hardship, but also prevented the artist from being superficial, and helped keep the painting language lofty as it guaranteed the artist’ abilities both in thoughts and deeds. It was hard to imagine, without the support of “pain”, how Xu could produce so many large series of paintings besides his busy work as a leader both in college and society. The “pain,” to a larger extent, was an embodiment of the artist’s pursuit of art, to history and to the world. The concept of time implied in the paintings inspired the historical sense.

Either in Chess of the Gods or Landscapes of History, either in installation or easel painting, Xu presents a record of history with a unique style and ideas. We frequently feel the artist’s sensitivity to the world in his works of art, “the dialectics permeated between individual and group, between collective effects and individual events; the interaction and succession between the self-controlled feeling and national faculty; the distillation and development of different aspects of style and idea.” The procedure of artistic practice is, as Mallarme’s verse, like playing dice; fortuity is never omitted. However, as a self-conscious artist, Xu is immersed in a conversation between personal memory and the tradition. Knit by the memory and the inheritance, the non-historical-cored issues in the historical concepts were displayed—the original action.

He does not attempt to show the existing historical vision, but to cross the set reality, to return to the original state, to grasp the instant images that keep changing and are hardly caught by human eyes.

Zizek said: “With the aid of Oedipus, we are easily able to perform a historical game, displaying the Oedipus-like parasitic life in a society of patriarchy. However, it is a harder job to distinguish which concrete factor determines and opens a historical field from the historical chance of Oedipus.”

It is practically an arduous struggle to grasp what we regard as “the nature of things.” Only with hard work can historical significance support, bear and regain. And we do feel the hardship in his works, real and deep.

Xu made his Chess Match series from 1989 to 1994. There isn’t any accidental choice for such a self-conscious artist. The installation Playing Chess with Voltaire was described as “symbolizing the meet and collusion of western and eastern culture and mentally catering to the western culture of Chinese intellectuals—mood of revolt.” Thus the artist’s purpose was narrowed while the sign of Voltaire was generalized. Why Voltaire? Not Rousseau, not Hegel. Voltaire was undoubtedly one of the most important thinkers of the Enlightenment and was called “the conscience of Europe.” But why did the artist choose Voltaire to open a dialogue beyond time and space? It is all owing to Mr. Conscience’s scheming. In Auden’s poem “Voltaire of Freney,” Voltaire was squatting like a farmer cunningly nearby to wait till the enemy fell down. At that time, Voltaire built up his final hideout in Freney, at the border of France and Switzerland. He became the spiritual symbol of the European world when he was 70. Emperors of Russia, Prussia, and Denmark invested money to establish a copper statue for him. Voltaire said proudly to his guest: “What a good hand I have! Four kings!” it was interesting to play chess with such a wily old fox. Unlike Rousseau or Hegel, who were as stubborn and boring as a hedgehog checking you with one move in a row, Voltaire was waiting for you to make a mistake. Just as the expression of the statue by Houdon, Voltaire was pondering over the major problems of the universe and himself, while there was a trace of derision to the mankind in his smile. It was such a person who made us understand how the spirit got its freedom. Xu’s “Playing Chess with Voltaire” was not merely concerning about the issues of metaphysics, he made chess pieces with the icons of himself and his colleagues and placed these pieces on the two sides of the chessboard, moving and interacting. It would be too sloppy to read it as the “collusion of western and eastern culture.” If the Enlightenment of the 18th century was regarded as a time to rebuild the social system and regulate human behavior according to the absolute rational faculty, the tricks Voltaire employed on relativity might be missed. Voltaire knew more clearly than anyone else that mankind existed in various possibilities; meanwhile, ideas and cultures were relative, not universally applicable.

Xu stepped into the direct reference of materiality in Chess Match of Power (1993). In the picture, hands were tossing and turning with coins instead of chess pieces. A year later, he finished the painting The Exercise of Leather and Cloth Shoes, in which the recognition of reality was no longer avoided. Leather shoes and cloth shoes, Xu juxtaposed these two human things of different periods not only to depict the contradiction and contrast, but also to display rationally the immediate situation of pluralistic existence.

We felt a swift sense of speed and an attempt to control to the speed to reach something of a balance in The Sound of Landscape. Upon finishing the painting, the artist said: “All is a kind of drifting, moving and adventure. When the pictorial plane is swelling, it loses the meaning of the swell. When the representation completely exterminates the presentation, the extermination itself dies out. The ‘game of chess’ deduces to pictorial plane, when the deduction becomes excessive design. The ‘other side’ is eternally existing while ‘the real life’ is inimitable.” If “the other side” externally exists, however, the only certainty we believed in is reasonable to exist.

An artist who believed the external existence of “the other side” was like Moses who led the Israelites out of Egypt, taking adventures in painting life, leading the spiritual tribe moving on the land. We could faintly hear deep and strong singing of concern in The Sound of Landscape, which echoed Elytis’ verse, “unfortunately, the globe is revolving at the cost of us.” The intense meditation on Humanities initiated by Voltaire became a deep and vigorous tone with the dynamics and intensity strengthened in The Sound of Landscape. Boundary was crossed; limit was exterminated in the resounding music.

Many people mentioned the sense of history and ruins when speaking of the large-scaled series Chess Match of the Century (1996-1998), for which Xu was named the first Chinese “painter of ruins.” The desolate scene was undoubtedly the best sign of memory. It was such an impressive visual element that displaying it directly could discover the sorrows of history. Xu did much more than this. He continued and developed the idea of “chess playing,” in which the “chess piece” and the “hand” represented the activated inner qualities of the artist’s life. Therefore, the hands playing chess remained unchanged while the chessboard changed to the magnificent ruins. Du Fu, a famous poet of the Tang dynasty, once expressed the feeling of history when facing the rise and fall caused by the collapse of the civilization. We found similarities in Xu’s paintings. Chess becomes a metaphor, the “superficial reality” of visual experience being re-read. The artist shifted the relationship and situation of the figures to detect again and again the hidden myth of the world. In the background was a desolate city; in the foreground were rapidly moving hands, up and down, declaring violence, meanwhile recalling a tender felling. The movement of the hands, penetrating the pictorial plane, caught an incredible sense of speed, by which the changing phantom of speed was fixed. The freely falling hand was drawn into the plane with a kind of mental violence; hands from all directions met and passed, showing the struggle of speed and the flashing changes. Through the scene after scene of the vast and cold depictions, the cruel nature of human and the religious passion, which had been sacrificed on the fire, showed an impassable characteristic. The philosophers who declared, “God is dead” and the contemporary theological destructionists might form a powerful alliance with the painter. In this way, Xu was always near metaphysics despite the obvious materiality.

In a painting about the bombardment in Kosovo in 1999, the artist displayed an image of an anxious city, with irregular and unchained strokes depicting a burnt and ruined land. A pair of bloodstained hands holding a chess piece in each, got through the light and shadow, as if the hand of the God were drifting in the human world. Justice and evil, god and the dead, met and merged at the boundary between the world and the nether world.

The witchcraft of ancient Egypt, or the micro-electron mechanics, every element was combined in the artist’s mysterious way, thus the accurate significance of the paintings became an eternal contrast to Heinsberg’s Uncertainty Principle. This principle denied Einstein’s thought of “God never plays dice” and proved that the world was ruled by chance. However, the tone or the atmosphere of the painting was certainly depressing and pessimistic, or vehement and impassioned. Were those lines, which expressed emotion, the ones that transmitted the power from the hell to the real world? The power from the darkness was changing the environment of our age to an unendurable state like any other past period of disaster.

The contemporary art of the 20th century, in a larger extent, bore a face of expressionism or existentialism. The artistic features of expressionist paintings, as the critic Paul Verlaine said, “are fused with emotion and emotional objects”. The expressionist art did not aim at the object proper, but the artist’s emotion of the object. Importantly, it was an art of passion, an ecstasy caused by the fun-imitation and the control of the world. This kind of passion was tangible in Xu’s paintings. He tried to make us read the express and release of the emotion and the emotional information through visible gestures. The crises of the ages and the anxiety of times often brought anxious factors into the works of art. Walled City, Steles and Twin Towers, all these large-scaled paintings were seemingly coincide with Wagner’s opera stage or the baroque works of Rubens, in the assumption of painting with a flamethrower. The artist gifted a grand commemoration to the unyielding desperation; it seemed to be declaring, even recalling that the vacancy was the major principle, was the truth, i.e., the life.

Despite the sincerity and the uncompromising criticism, realism cannot gain a place in the wholly dark desperation. The final reality is that: not all the creation of human beings is easily to be misunderstood, but all can make up. Miiosz said: “Besides me, there should be someone walking under the stars, and trying to understand his age.” With further observation, we may noticed that, comparatively speaking, Xu’s paintings are more historical and self-conscious, due to the special times and the growing background. Paintings of other artists, in the mean time, are generally more individual, more dependent on mentality and senses and more colorful.

The movement of the hands are still found in Beijing series, such as Great Beijing: Forbidden City and Great Beijing: Bell Tower. But here Xu exterminated the signal function of the hand into the picture. The hands here are like the gazing eyes of the artist. Xu glared at Beijing and at history, witnessing objects with great mercy and tenderness as if it were the permanent homeland of mankind, mysterious, vast and limitless. The artist expresses his poetic emotion to his heart’s content in this series, especially in Forbidden City in Winter. The hands vanished and left the lonely palace and the silent falling snow fakes as the final coordinates in the dark night. “Singing sadly as weeping; seeing from a distance as going home.” The uncommon, mysterious and boundless poetic romance declared a dignity in the midnight chant.

The artist finished the Shanghai series with Messianic mission. He seemed, from the very beginning, to run through the shell of our conscience and memory and refill into our minds everything that was leaving us. Although the artist’s consciousness would not accept the nihilism as the final home, the invisible indicator was warning us that everything was doomed to ruins. The vision was occupied with burnt land and countless fragments. In the historical circulation of our mental pains being revealed, we kept asking: where is our final comfort?

Xu’s paintings are works of imposing grandeur and placid mood. Most critics noticed the roles of form and color in Xu’s paintings, but hardly realized the time as the source of mood. In the above analysis of his works, we didn’t find once the “time” passing through the hands. Lessing argued in Laocoon: “Object with visual feature is the particular subject of painting. Objects that are timely or physically continuous are called movement, which is the particular object of poetry.” According to this definition, painting is to represent the static for, i.e., it catches an instant picture of the changing world and makes it a static image on the plane. Language is an art of time, in contrast, expressing a linear image with rhythm and cluster of the words. Lessing’s words are always quoted to differentiate poetry and painting. Hogarth suggested “poetry as painting,” which could be understood as “painting is so, so is poetry. So we often consider poetry as a sound painting while painting as a silent poetry. Thus it can be seen that, whether in poetry or painting, form and time are two axes of human’s experience to the physical world. Xu seemed to realize the problem and the chance of the traditional definitions of poetry and painting and attempted to prove with his special artistic language, that painting indeed incorporated the two axes and the static plane picture itself was the medium of time. That was why Xu was fond of painting series pictures, such as Twelve Views of Sunflower Field

In many of Xu’s paintings, form and time produced an inner instability of artistic representation; multiple ways of inference might exist in the pictorial plane at the same time. In the western history of thought, form has two interpretations: idea and solid shape, while one is internal concept, the other is external one. Whatever form is, it is contrast to the fleeting feelings and the details of experience. Chinese philosophers thought great image was formless and formlessness was the origin of the nature. Form is united. Emotion and experience are the falling snowflakes, various and ever changing. All the changes turn into one and the channel of feeling is the most direct experience of time. Time and form is in fact a pair of intergrowth. In Xu’s paintings, the form of the represented object is the timely record of the artist’s thought and practice, but as a visual representation, the instability of time is more internal than that of form.

Every day, we are experiencing time and form. It is easy to find a way to relate time, but hard to display it. Words, spoken or written, make us experience a non-speed order in their continuity. We use past tense and conjunction to note sequence and change. Comparatively speaking, a painting, displaying an entity or entities, has some kind of permanent form. Seen as representation, the spatial fragment gets the feature of stability. Xu broke the bounds of time and form with intense strokes and layers of colors. Here the artist instinctly transformed painting to performance, which was filled with a unique consciousness of time and history, i.e., representing time by some kind of performing shapes and colors. This chronological order is the essence of “the scenery of history.” Xu’s paintings prove that man narrates stories with words, but narrates histories with images. Every form seen in Xu’s painting evolves in our imagination to the potential space where form exists. Changes of every form, drifting from the static state, activate a new space. Like any other series of paintings, in Twelve Views of Sunflower Field, I can feel Xu Jiang trying to put the tension of time and form to the ultimate extent. Each change and transformation is telling a new story: the tragedy implied in the broken history and the hope of life.

We get layers of joy while reading Xu Jiang. Naming him the master of light and shade or the artist of dark tone is a shortsighted understanding of the fantastic, puzzling tones. These tones tend to disappear out of our vision, glossing over the space with uncertainty, implying a desperate mood; therefore, bestowing the space with a mysterious feeling and creating a sense of vast time and space.

Many artists have attempted to cultivate the same field as Xu does, but they mainly produced sharp and frightening sensual stimulation. While other artists deal with similar symbols and make very local and national statements, Xu stands on the national base of self-choice and chooses symbols with universal meanings. This is what his paintings value. To what extent can the past and present China be presented fairly by Xu’s movement of ideology? This question may never be answered. But Xu is willing to take the pain of inquiring the no-answer question and to tell the story of time inside his mind. It is the painstaking quest that bring Xu’s paintings into a mood of understated greatness.