Notions and standards of beauty change with the times. The masterworks of art that are born of this change will, at a certain point, enter into the eternal halls of aesthetics to be appreciated by the generations. The remaining artworks, no matter how much importance is assigned to them at the time, will be swept away mercilessly by the times. Art is wonderful, but also ruthless. It is like a beautiful woman locked in battle with a wild beast. The creator must grasp the shifts in ideas and mediums, and maintain independence within, highlighting his individuality to form a singular personal style. Yet he also must fuse his creations into the "unchanging standards" of art, gaining the acceptance of those unquantifiable, unexplainable eternal standards accumulated through history and tradition. Art does not distinguish between ancient and modern; it cares only for the beautiful and the ugly. Art is a paradox: it must carve its own unique path within the territory of tradition. In other words, individuality can only reveal itself within the framework of tradition. Otherwise, this originality would be no different from the illusions of the deranged.

　　Edgar Wind once said that the essence of art is to transmute expression into skill. Ernst Gombrich's research into the psychology of images demonstrated that the crux of artistic creation lay in the elevation of this transmuted skill into expression, the transition from the representation of schemas, observations and skills to expression. Thus, the work of art is a tripartite reflection or projection of the soul, nature and skill. In the mediums of pencil, lithograph and painting, Su Xinping has discovered the mysterious, self-contained logic that links the image to the soul. He has also discovered the unresolved predicament in which he resides.

　　The soul is not a blank slate. When it faces nature, it is projecting. Nature is not an objective existence, not the truth as it is seen by the eye. Skill is not inborn, but subject to interference from traditional crafts. The unique value of art, however, begins with the creator's transcendental reading of nature, medium and form. As Plato has said, art is the dream the waking mind needs, a work of imagination far removed from everyday life. Though, as with dreams, art is driven by certain unknown forces, it can provide different perspectives and facets for recognizing reality, and so form often has two faces: form as intangible idea, and form as solid shape. The former is an idea from within the soul, and the latter is an idea external to the soul. These are things that only art can give to the viewer. We can see that the intersection of experience and transcendence form the soul of Su Xinping's artworks. They are shadows in the dream realm, as well as the results of imagination. He first established his place in painting with lithographs, and the cast shadow dominates the ideas and expressive techniques in his works.

　　Su Xinping's art began with cast shadows:

　　The geography of Inner Mongolia is quite unique. Since childhood, I always saw strong light and clear shadows. They seemed to represent a sense of mystery, giving people the feeling that there is much within: fear, mystery, ghosts, everything. This is the result of the stories I was told since childhood and the climate and geography in which I grew up. I later discovered that lithography had artistic methods that were quite close to me. As soon as I reached out and laid down the stylus, I discovered something I had been seeking for so many years. It is itself gray, so it lends itself to highlighting colors.

　　This recollection is in close accord with one of the earliest Italian treatises on painting, Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte, pointing directly to a core principle of painting: "…for which we must be endowed with imagination and skill, to discover things … and form with the hand, and present to the sight, that which did not before appear to exist." For the artist, transcendental form has always been a fleeting perception, one in opposition to experiential details. In order to transform it into a unique visual form requires finding the suitable materials and mediums in reality. The materials and forms of painting were invented and employed to this very end.

　　The invention of lithography technology in 18th century Europe was one of the most momentous inventions after Gutenberg's invention of lead alloy movable type. Lithography utilizes the fact that oil and water do not mix, but it does share some commonalities with woodcutting, engraving and etching. It allows more freedom for expression, and allows for the artist to place his uniquely individual traces on display. The great painters of 19th century Europe all had a love for lithography, exploring the material's unique allure. One of the most unique effects of this medium is that its gray-yellow monochrome images could create the illusion of shadow, bathing its forms in a mysterious light. Su Xinping deftly employs this expressive potential of lithography to capture the transcendent perceptions that he has gained from reality.

　　Su Xinping uses shadows as his method for constructing mysterious light effects in his paintings, an approach that requires rational control ability. Painting is an eternal paradox. Perhaps all of man's creative inventions are rooted in paradox. To enter into the dream realm of Surrealist art requires the strongest representational painting skills. It is the same with mystical painting. Without the expression of reality, Surrealism is unintelligible. Su Xinping's lithographs place great emphasis on the construction of rational spaces, but these structures encapsulate visions beyond reason, forming a sense of suspension in time that swells under the dreamlike light. That space is concrete, and under the shadows cast by the powerful light, the details of the form within become lifelike, compelling the viewer to look closely, to discover the dream world behind this "feel of reality." Here, the nightmarish projection of light gives shape to solid outlines, taking the viewer's imagination on a flight of fancy to a distant place it has never been before.

　　The expression of light and shadow was the main means for the artistic revolution of the Renaissance. The combination of light, shadow, and perspective allowed painters to create the illusion of a three-dimensional world on the two-dimensional plane, giving the objects in paintings a relief effect. Shadow refers to the dark areas created by the contrast created when light hits an opaque object. Art theory of the 17th century classified shadow as having three degrees: penumbra, mezzo'bra and sbattimento. From ancient Roman mosaics, we can see that shadow has always been an expressive technique in European painting, becoming an important medium of representational art by the Renaissance. The use of shadow is a double-edged sword, one that presented a predicament for modern painting. Su Xinping's painting can be seen as an Eastern link in the chain of exploration of this predicament. Leon Battista Alberti, the writer of Europe's first work on painting theory, as well as painters Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, all explored theory of cast shadows. Da Vinci carried out systematic experiments on cast shadows, believing that the illusion of "relief" in painting derived from the appropriate allocation of light and shadow. He drew many diagrams that demonstrated the different lighting conditions that produced various types of shading and how we recognize and understand them. He pointed out that if the geometric relationships between light source and shadows is handled properly, it can bolster the purity and stability of the form. If not, it subverts the whole. Cast shadows are a factor that is very difficult to render. Looking back over the history of lighting and shading in art, we quickly discover that many great representational artists intentionally avoided cast shadows, because if the projection was not just right, it would destroy the unified harmony of the composition. This was affirmed in the painting of the high Renaissance. At the time, the creation of revolving shapes was the question on which many painters were focused. In the manuscript for Treatise on Painting, da Vinci devoted 67 pages to the discussion of light and shadow. Strong outdoor light creates striking contrasts between light and shadow on figures and objects. In attempting to capture that in a painting, it is difficult to avoid a sense of crudeness that destroys the feel of nature, because of the conflict between shadow outlines and light outlines. His suggestion to painters was that they devised a smoky haze between the two to soften their contrast and gain an overall sense of harmony. Later European painters mostly took his suggestion to heart, using the "sfumato" technique to soften the hard transitions between light and dark, particularly for the effects of cast shadows. Su Xinping's art, particularly his lithographs, is rooted in the European system. He seems, however, to have turned his back on da Vinci's warning, turning strong contrasts between light and shadow, as well as the "crudeness" of cast shadows, into a conceptual theme and language of painting. The cast shadow is the subject matter of his paintings, as well as their form. The spaces, figures and animals in his images, as well as the relationships between them, all stem from the modelling of cast shadows.

　　The Silent Town series of lithographs, completed between 1991 and 1992, is a projection of Su Xinping's childhood living environment, including the shadows of the soul that emerge through the projection. From study to complete work, the cast shadow was the main actor throughout the process, quietly performing its own story: the shadows of the dark mud walls silently clash with the cast shadows; the long shadow cast by a lone electrical pole is often refracted onto the wall, making it like a heavy cross; between the mud wall, in the shape of a Mongolian yurt, and the shadows, a herdsman on horseback, head hung low, is crossing through the zebra lines cast by the electrical pole. The horse has fused into the wall, becoming a papercut. It is as if the rider and the horse's head are emerging from the wall, approaching the cross shadow cast by the electrical pole. The horse's body is a silhouette of the horse in the 1990 work Wall.

　　In these works, man and horse, form and shadow form into stark paradoxes, like the graphic paradoxes of René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. It appears that the artist has painstakingly constructed these illusions. The intersection of tangible forms and illusory shadows creates illusions in space and life. The spaces and shapes woven from strong light and shadow encompass scenes of isolation, desolation, sadness and loneliness in their purity. The sense of substance created by the overall shadows and the carefully laid outlines suddenly turn into a sense of longing, of unfathomable emotional forms, scenes that slowly penetrate the heart. This reminds me of the "transmutation" story in Zhuangzi, wherein Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, not knowing he was Zhuangzi. Upon awakening, he did not know if he was Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Along the same lines as this dream, Su Xinping declares, "My relationship with animals is like my relationship with nature. They can connect with me with no obstruction. I am them and they are me." Su Xinping uses visual means to develop this metaphor into a rich allegory. Sentiments are transmuted into a white horse, but the white horse is not a horse. It flies across the expanse like the flow of time, like Zhuangzi exclaimed, almost unnoticed. Zhuangzi used a white horse in his metaphor for the rapid flight of time. For Su Xinping, the white horse and time are the interplay of objects, form and mind. It is a visual metaphor, the materialization of the ephemeral and intangible. The white horse, having been transmuted into an image, extends the mobility of this imagery. The white horse is like a shadow, so the shadow has independent life. Under the light of the sun, the shadow takes shape from form, creating an unsettling sense of suspense. Meanwhile, the shadow forms a contrast with the bland white cast by the radiant sun, creating richer shapes. It would seem that, under the light of the sun descending from the sky, the traces left by an individual life are not found in that life's own radiance, but in the shadows it casts. The rich changes in shadows affirm the many magical shapes of life. It is in such a reading that we should provide a warning to art critics. Language can lay out long-winded interpretations such as this on the art of Su Xinping or any artist for that matter, and such interpretations seem to always affirm the artist's own statements. Su Xinping grew up in the highlands of Inner Monglia. "I had a habit of sitting up in a tree between the land and the sky, looking out over the grassland, and at the clouds in the sky. I was always thinking, what is there behind the clouds?" He later told us, "there are a lot of unknown, mysterious things" behind them, "a real world full of mysterious tones," a scene that "fuses with the dream realm of the night, leaving me at once terrified and enchanted," a scene which can "only be embodied in shadows." He discovered that lithography came the closest to capturing this expression of shadows.

　　It would appear that Su Xinping has clearly declared his creative motives and the meaning of his images. In that case, any external commentary seems superfluous, guilty of over-interpretation. The casualness and difficulty of art criticism are one and the same. Su Xinping is a lonely, self-reflecting artist, an exploratory painter with the courage to break rules and conventions, and it is precisely because of this that he often places himself in dire straits, in suspenseful predicaments. In fact, no great artist knows where the path before him will lead, setting out with only a murky sense of direction and courage and sincerity towards art. We know the past, we don't know the future, but we must move forward. Perhaps history alludes to the future. If we return Su Xinping's works into their place in the map of history, perhaps it will provide a thread for understanding his art, and will maybe even indicate the artistic issues he faces. Su Xinping's life and individual experiences influence his selection of subject matter and conceptual expression, but are not a definitive factor in his creations. The definitive factor is the artistic language he employs. The sum total of his set mediums, forms, styles, techniques, corresponding themes and traditions form a particular artistic language in his work. Every artist works within this linguistic framework, be they conservatives or trailblazers. Artistic creation does not arise from nothing; it arises from something. The artist's originality or individual style must be tested within this framework to take on value.

　　The cast shadow is a distinctive expressive technique in Su Xinping's art. It is difficult for us to determine whether this is rooted in his observations and experiences of a particular environment, or in the influence of painting history or language. Bestowing the relationships between the heavens, earth and mankind in the vast, unshaded highlands of Inner Mongolia with abstract imagery is doubtless the living wellspring on which Su Xinping's art depends. To refine this into art requires the discovery of the most expressive methods. Su Xinping's Shadow series traces the language of painting back to its source. Painting was born from the casting of shadows. David Allan devotes much of his 1775 treatise The Origin of Painting to this theme. The depiction of shadows on the human body captures the external form, but is even more an allusion to reflection from outside in. Su Xinping's Untitled series is a variation on shadows. In one painting, an old man reaches out his hand as if to touch the shadow. Here, emptiness and substance, internal and external intersect. Leonardo warned painters to avoid shadows, but many who came after him boldly employed shadows, transforming them into an important element in conveying emotions and building atmosphere. Some, like Su Xinping, elevated them to the level of a latent theme of painting. Masaccio's Saint Peter Healing the Sick with his Shadow is an example of shadows as a dramatic theme in painting. The subject matter of the painting takes on a psychological narrative through the shadow. Su Xinping has gone further in this direction. The people in his paintings have the typical look of Mongolians, which is to say that he did not focus on conveying the expressions and individual traits of the figures, but instead focused on their general look, revealing their dramatic emotions through their shadows. Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus (1601) is the classic example of dramatic expression through shadows. Each shadow cast in the painting heightens the significance of the people's movements, while creating a crisis that threatens to subvert the modelling of the human form and clarity of composition. The same issue is behind every turn in Su Xinping's artworks. By diluting the individualized expressions and actions of people, he gains the opportunity to balance the painting in shadow. On this point, Su Xinping is on common ground with Dutch painter Emanuel de Witt, but in terms of imagery, he is closer to the Surrealism in Giorgio de Chirico's Enigma of a Day. Su Xinping's Dream and Drifting White Cloud series particularly evoke de Chirico's dream state of the empty city square. The floating clouds and the solitary herdsmen out on the vast grassland cast a mournful hum with their long shadows. Plato transmuted the shadow in the cave into the ladder between reality and ideas, one leading us beyond the everyday into a field of dialogue with ideas.

　　The casting of shadows tells mysterious stories, and stands in as the mysterious prophet. The shadows cast in Su Xinping's art all tell of the unpredictable things that will take place outside of the scene. Nineteenth century British artist William Collins painted Coming Events. In this painting, a child on a rural road has just opened the fence, and is about to take off his hat. The artist deftly employs a shadow to allude to a horseman about to enter the village. Su Xinping transformed this narrative technique into a surreal method. In such works as Drifting White Cloud No.2 , anything can happen. The massive clouds, the horse rushing out of the painting, the facial expressions of the herdsmen squatting and standing at center, all are marked by the shadows, alluding to something mysterious coming.

　　"Lithography is a means. What is expressed is not the most important." If that is the case, what is the most important? Su Xinping is searching through the haze. There are other methods that serve as paths that can help us to find the answer.

　　The center of gravity in Su Xinping's creations has shifted from lithography to oil painting. This shift in media reflects a process of the shadow transforming into illusion. Man's descent is driven by desire. From such works as Sea of Desire and Fighters , through Hurry , Holiday and Cheers , and on through Last Supper , Descent and Floating Person , Su Xinping has been providing a direct, visual interpretation of the weaknesses of human nature in the modern world. The basic tone of his visual language is still that of cast shadows, as if he is incorporating Caravaggio's cast shadows while brightening the colors. In Last Supper No.2 , the shadows and projections are still an important technique for depicting facial expressions. His 2009 Self-Portrait pushes this to the extreme.

　　In addressing the question of translation, Goethe held that in the process of translation, the translator must avoid struggling against the foreign language, striving instead to understand and respect those things that can only be intimated, not translated. It is precisely those untranslatable things that encompass the traits and values of a language. It is the same with artistic language. Artist and viewer must respect its subtle "grammar."

　　In lithography, the artist uses a special stylus containing a grease solution to create an image on a special plate. It requires chemical processes to set a printable image on the plate, which is printed in reverse on the paper. In Su Xinping's creative trajectory, the artistic language of lithography formed his earliest graphic world. When he shifted to oil painting, the differences in tools and materials, between the brush and the stylus, the canvas and the printing stone, formed the linguistic traits of these two major art forms. As Su Xinping's oil paintings are heavily influenced by the formal language and effects of lithography, his oil paintings serve as a dialogue between the languages of lithography and oil. Oil painting stands apart from the other mediums in its unique ability to render the texture, lighting, color and tactility of the subjects expressed. The subject conveyed through the brushstrokes and colors on the canvas seems to be a real image that you can reach out and touch. The greatest difference between oil painting and lithography is this "tactility and color." Everything in oil painting, including the brushstrokes, the shaping and the colors, can provide the painter and viewer with a sense of tangibility. The texture of oil painting itself is encapsulated in this tactility. These linguistic traits that set it apart from lithography, once internalized by the artist, actually serve to highlight the "lithograph" qualities of his paintings. The artistic language of the lithograph forms an important element in Su Xinping's individual artistic traits. In his oil paintings, he is constantly drawing from elements of lithography, such as painting methods, its flatness, its pure structure, and magnifying and purifying them. For instance, it is difficult to imagine the 1994 work Hurried Person No.1 appearing as a print, but in the 2010 work of the same title, we can see more freedom and confidence. This is the projection of the art of lithography into oil painting. Rembrandt transferred the lighting and shading effects of engraving into oil painting. He and his students often treated shadows and their casting as an independent expressive method. In A Man Seated Reading at a Table in a Lofty Room, the person is small and obscure. What fills our vision is the powerful drama of light formed from the subtle brushwork. Su Xinping broke up light and shadow, transforming them into brushstrokes. Each stroke of the brush in his oil paintings can be seen as a microcosm of the cast shadows. His giant 2014 pastel painting is also the product of the synthesis of shadows.

　　Shadows and projections are the language with which Su Xinping observes and expresses the world. As Goethe said, if a person's native language is the foundation for his understanding and thinking about the world, then one's observations and thoughts on the shapes and scenes around him will also indoctrinate the eyes. Heinrich W?lfflin once said, "The more often one goes to Italy and the more intimately one comes to know it, the more alien it appears. However, it is possible that these experiences make the traveler more clearly and intimately aware of the special worth of the things in his own country." Having recognized his cultural genes and visual uniqueness within a system of reference, Su Xinping gave them a further level of refinement in his 2006 Landscape and Gray series. These giant works call to mind the Song and Yuan dynasty paintings, in that they are not collections of specific brushstrokes and compositions, but overall atmospheres, which are brimming with a modern air. These seem to be works that send the traces of surviving Song and Yuan paintings through a modern deconstruction to highlight the influence of the times. The intentionally magnified traits of the different mediums allude to the destruction of classical properties. The myriad things of heaven and earth have thus lost their animating spirits, pushed to the side to make way for blind, wild, bizarre and hurried methods of growth, leaving us in suspense about how they will grow in the future. Here, there are no distinctions between the content, mediums and methods of the painting. All are in the service of growth. All things in nature grow, and the painter's brushstrokes should also grow according to nature: "Do not set some precondition, or predefine a result. Simply follow perceptions and intentions to paint, spreading the color on the canvas, the second stroke following the shape of the first, generating thickly or thinly. Simply continue in this way…"

　　The landscapes Su Xinping creates in this manner have a powerful visual impact, giving the sense of a dense, dark chaos. He perhaps unconsciously absorbed the creative state of traditional Chinese calligraphy. The method is, as Zhang Huaiduan described in the preface to Judgments on Calligraphers, "traces with multiple ends, change becoming itself a state," the effect as if "there is a scattering of something like clouds, chance giving rise to form." This approach of following the propensity of change and placing the natural progression of the process over outcomes is an important modern aesthetic concept.

　　At the juncture of his transition, Su Xinping encountered another paradox of art. On one hand, he had to suspend or discard all of his previous knowledge, methods and systems of paintings, reestablishing everything while being "faithful to my feelings, perceptions and insights." Here, the artist had to transcend traditions as well as himself. On the other hand, no matter what we discard or how we perceive, we cannot avoid being influenced by what we know and what we have. The courage of Su Xinping's resolve to "set out on a unique path that belongs to me personally," is itself a typical concept of modern art history. If one's individual perceptions truly were individual, having no connection to what one learns or knows, then the art that we can appreciate and critique would no longer exist, and the different styles and forms of different periods could never emerge. Biologically speaking, the eye of the artist is no different from that of the common person, and the same is the case for the psychological mechanisms governing it. People and every other organism are born with the ability to process and utilize information without their own conscious mechanisms. But these inborn mechanisms cannot produce the eye of the artist. Ancient Roman orator Cicero said, "Painters see more in shadows and protrusions than we ever do." Our visual cognition must always be selective. Otherwise, we will be inundated in the flood of visual information. Because it is selective, we can focus on certain attributes of the environment while overlooking others, and it is precisely because of this that we can train ourselves to observe certain attributes. The observing and perceiving soul is not a blank slate that passively absorbs and imprints external information, but one that selects and combines information with the help of certain schemas. Artists in history have been equipped with different schemas of observation and perception, applying their focus to the attributes of people and nature in different mediums to construct their own visual, graphic worlds. It is from this that there emerge different schools of art, different "eyes of the times," different "eyes of the painter."

　　Su Xinping hopes to seek out his own unique path within self-negation. This is the spirit of self-sacrifice and courage that all great artists must have. Theory is one thing, but creations are another. Radical concepts seem to be an essential catalyst for artistic creation. There are no contemporary arbiters in art, much less oracles. The lesson art critics take from art history is not to make any conclusions on contemporary artists lightly. In discussing the art of Su Xinping, I have tried to connect it to past creative approaches, such as Surrealism. If I had to assign his recent oil paintings to a particular category, it would be Expressionism or Symbolism with spiritual or allegorical leanings. Here, the name El Greco comes to mind. Su Xinping's art is quite different from his, but their creative drives are in accord. El Greco's paintings were praised by some of his peers, but people disliked his fervent pursuit of originality, and assailed him for trampling on artistic convention. The eighteenth century enlightenment critics saw him as a madman. By the early twentieth century, critics saw this crazed painter as having not only a weak spirit, but weak vision as well. In the centuries after, only a few artists, such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Fran?ois Millet, édouard Manet and Pablo Picasso, appreciated the quality and talent of his painting. Picasso saw him as a pioneer of the painting tradition that was later followed by Diego Velázquez, calling him the first modern painter. Today, El Greco stands comfortably among the top figures in art history. This is clearly a mockery of the critics from previous centuries. Picasso is probably the most consciously innovative artist we have seen to date, and this mentality encourages such contemporary painters as Su Xinping. Picasso was also unable to predict the future results that would come at each turning point, facing the same feeling of suspense that Su Xinping faces today. When we look back over Picasso's artistic trajectory, there is one affirming and revealing point: his unique art was born out of diverse traditions from the past. He received rigorous training in the traditions of Velázquez and Barcelona, and spent many years researching and painting after El Greco. At the height of his Cubism period, he studied the drawings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. He knew well that without a great and diverse system of reference, one could never transcend himself and travel down a unique creative path.

　　Su Xinping is well-steeped in representational—or as the Chinese call it, "realist"—techniques. He has recently returned to the pencil, using pencils of varying hardness to draw details of his spiritual landscape on rough papers of manageable sizes, which he then combines into giant, sweeping works. This echoes Picasso's own return to portraits in pencil or charcoal. When Picasso stood at the crossroads, he spoke of Ingres. When Su Xinping stands and the juncture of a transformation, he speaks of the imagery in his heart.

　　An artist who faces no predicaments will have no outlet in the future, or prospects for innovation. Art is the beautiful outcome of bitter struggle. Every outstanding artist must consider the issues of tradition, the era, and individual style. I believe that the dilemma of China's artists today is mainly rooted in the issues of "modernity" and "image."

　　In discussing modernity, the dueling concepts of realism and abstraction often entangle artistic theory and practice, but this issue does not touch on the ontology of painting, because such distinctions fall under a misconception of the "image." Art is limitation, the use of limitations in expression. The painter cannot paint beyond the realm of the object he is expressing. What the painter conveys is not information about the thing. Images are about information, not artistic expression. There is no distinction in artistic expression between abstraction and realism. One element that can be drawn from in modernism is the emphasis on limitation. Everything serves the thing that can be expressed. The plane limits the techniques, spaces and times that can be used to convey the thing. This has nothing to do with realism or abstraction. Caravaggio's Resurrection of Lazarus contains more abstraction than pure abstract painting. Strength transforms energy into expression, not information. To a great extent, the discarding of visual information to return to the expression of painting itself, or the expressiveness of the medium, is a trait of modernity. This is sometimes misunderstood as the "planar" nature of painting.

　　Every practitioner with an innovative attitude hopes, to a greater or lesser extent, to break free of traditional models and make their works modern. Logically speaking, modernity is a false question. Every era is, in regards to itself, modern. Artistically, modern is not the same as new, and new is not the same as good. In that case, modernity is not a standard for evaluating artistic worth. Picasso saw the 16th century artist El Greco as the first modernist painter. This example demonstrates that it is impossible to discern what is new, what is innovative and what is "modern" at the time it is unfolding. There are, however, two trends that have clear modern traits. The first is that, under the strong modern desire for novelty in art, modernists often descend into games of technique. The second, with painting as the case in point, is that an overemphasis on modern art's difference from, or even rupture with the artistic concepts of the past, has led many practices that seek innovation and modernity to no longer be painting at all.

　　In Su Xinping's process of changing mediums in a quest for artistic modernity, I see his wariness of this risk of painting suicide. To the contrary of most modern techniques, he is seeking a new painting that is more modern and individual, creations that are more ontologically paintings.

作者：Cao,Yiqiang