There is enough to be decoded in the art of Su Xinping to fill a thick essay collection, covering virtually all of his life, creations and eras, even every artwork. This has pushed us to place this exhibition at the earliest moment of art—the viewing of the artwork—because viewing is much closer to art than is interpretation. Of course, there is no viewing with a "pure eye." As we view, it implies that we are also thinking, as if another living entity is activated and planted into your body through vision, and you are connecting to it spiritually or physiologically. Thinking and viewing form an experience that is at once fractured and unified. This is the best or worst part of art, depending on what you gain or lose from it, whether it elevates your understanding of the world or ruins your appetite for art. This exhibition hopes to use the art of Su Xinping as an individual to cast light on a problem in the modern image: the relationship between individual time and historical time, or how the graphic tension between serendipitous individual time and orderly historical time takes form. In this exhibition, this tension unfolds along the three axes of time, symbols and experiments.

　　I

　　Modernity's stripping away of man's natural attributes begins with time. The eternal view of the cosmos and the natural time of "work at sunrise, sleep at sunset" disappeared with the rise of the aimless, secular life of modern man. Present and past and time and space are in a state of existential rift. Man, driven by mechanical time, has lost the instinct for memory, and thus lost the ability to affirm one's place in existence and self-sufficiency through memory. Therefore, individual time can only be recovered through recollection. In an age without temporal depth, "memory is perhaps the last straw for modern man" (Wu Xiaodong).

　　Most of Su Xinping's art arises from thinking on the question of memory. If history is an overarching memory, and memory is nothing more than fragmented history, then Su Xinping's images stand between the two. The foundation that holds up his artworks is that universal, orderly public history, as he constantly attempts to use individual memory to dash against and pierce into the remote corners of history as a form of resistance against all individual perceptions and memories being swallowed by the great black hole of history. In many of Su Xinping's portraits, we see that there is only one person, a person in a ritual. Whether it is a herdsman or domestic animal situated within some inner order (Gazing Out, Family on the Steppe, Untitled 1 and 2), or a restless group driven by material and capital (Century Tower), or even hands in a gesture of prayer (Portrait), they are all dramatically fixed in a highly tense instant. In this high-speed era, he is attempting to use the painted image to reduce this speed, even to fix them within the moment. It is like a ritual, a silent drama, a fixed frame from a moving image. Walter Benjamin once discussed the relationship between the "aura" of the work of art and ritual: "We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the 'authentic' work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value" (Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Benjamin also stressed that the "aura" is the "unique phenomenon of a distance." In Su Xinping's figure and portrait paintings, we can see efforts to create an "aura" of the artwork through the fixing of a moment in time (Gao Minglu has also carried out in-depth analysis on the "sense of ritual" in Su Xinping's art). In the end, he pulled this conflict between history and memory into a landscape transcending history, giving the landscape a sense of human ritual as well. In Su Xinping's paintings, the landscape is at once eternal and constantly changing, giving both a sense of tension connected to Henri Bergson's psychological time. In his recent works, massive landscapes made from collages of drawings embody this dialectic. Those massive landscapes formed from tiny drawings can be seen as a metaphor for the multiplicity of time. Of course, he previously provided another approach to such collages of drawings, which is that these collages can be random and disordered. We can see that as another understanding of time, that modern time is, in essence, chaotic, multidimensional and impossible to grasp.

　　In order to provide space for viewers to see this thinking on time in Su Xinping's art, we consciously created imagery of a tunnel in the exhibition space. It is closed and dark, like a time capsule, with Su Xinping's works like phantoms travelling through this tunnel. We intentionally broke off the linear time in his creations, placing thirty years of his artworks within a hybrid model of time. We hope that the small lithographs from his early years and the more recent giant landscapes not only bring the same amount of surprise to viewers but also that, like a sonata, they are able to grasp the subtle difference between their principal themes, transitions and secondary themes. Meanwhile, the ritualized motion and stillness of time is the most noteworthy component of Su Xinping's art, a visual understanding of the dialectic between the eternal and fleeting in all things.

　　II

　　Su Xinping's art is also symbolic art. The graphic world he creates is an allusion to another, non-visible world. Marcel Proust said that without metaphor, there are no true memories. In the modern symbolist pedigree, Pierre Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and Edvard Munch created a body of symbols that is completely different from that of the classical symbolic era. Gone was the system of idols corresponding to the religious spirit, replaced by imagery connected to the intuitional experience of such ambiguous realms as dreams, anxiety and death. The fundamental difference from the classical world of symbols is that this new system did not lead us into a world of clear ideas like the worlds of the Greek gods, Jesus or the Buddha. To the contrary, these symbols hoped to draw our gaze into a world without clear symbolic objects, a bizarre world of the mind, like Franz Kafka's castle, Virginia Woolf's lighthouse, or Proust's madeleine pastry. This symbolism is internalized, intuitional, emotional and full of passion, marked by certain psychological symptoms, symptoms that also possess certain poetic traits. Between vehicle and tenor of the metaphor lies the tension between rational, orderly and chaotic cognition. The decline of symbolic art in contemporary times is due to the passing of the mythological world and the deep mental world. When space compressed time, the world of restless desire replaced the tranquil transcendental world, and symbols lost their dualist foundation. To borrow from Johan Huizinga's statement about symbolist art in the late medieval period, symbols have now "turned into meaningless intellectual games." But Su Xinping still insists on establishing his artistic images atop the classical aesthetic cornerstone of symbols.

　　Su Xinping's metaphorical world has its roots on the Mongolian Steppe. For him, it is a place of fable and myth, providing him, between imagination and reality, a stable temporal order made from recollection. When we view Su Xinping's lithographs from the 1980s and early 90s, we sense a powerful internal order, whether it is a deserted room, tranquil herdsmen or the back of a horse, this order is constructed from an animist mythos. In such works as Tranquil Small Town, Fluttering Clouds, Walking Men, and White Horse Walking towards the Distance, this metaphor is re-created through memory. In his works from the mid-1990s, we can clearly observe the loss of order in this metaphor. With the loss of the sense of temporal depth, the thinker can no longer engage in deep observation of the spectacular world of appearances, being manipulated by a sense of fragmentation that implies the disintegration and collapse of a stable world of metaphor. From Horse Looking Back, Shattered Mirror, Floating Person and on to Sea of Desire, Century Tower and Cheers, this process of the loss of order lasted almost eight years. In his works since the turn of this century, we can see the artist's efforts to overcome this visual fragmentation and bring deep memory back into the artist's world. To this end, he began shifting the vehicles of metaphor onto landscapes. These landscapes, however, can never return to their early tranquility, seemingly sealed in this fate. Landscape No.1 is a transitional artwork, like a curtain closed between scenes, where the clamor and bustle prepares to exit the stage. The new scene comes from a series of what he has called "landscapes of mental imagery." In this series, which still continues today, the images, like the titles of the artworks, are highly abstracted and bestowed with a musical rhythm. Here, the landscape serves as a new vehicle for metaphor with other forms of revelatory significance, from the fire imagery of the primordial chaos to the nightmarish illusions of modern man.

　　We have strived to create certain prompting imagery in the exhibition hall to guide viewers to probe the artist's psychological world behind the paintings and sense the symbolic qualities of Su Xinping's art. In the hallways connecting the four exhibition spaces, we have taken excerpts from epic poems the artist has read, such as the Mongolian epic poem Jangar, T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small. These passages are not parallel interpretations of Su Xinping's art but instead a form of supplementation and reflection between textual symbolic imagery and graphic symbolic imagery. Their role in Su Xinping's art is like the role of Greek and Hebrew mythology or the poetry of Paul Celan on the art of Anselm Kiefer. This world of language is inextricably linked to his world of images, placing Su Xinping's art constantly in a state of mutual interpretation between mythology and reality, human history and natural history, the rational and perceived worlds, and language and image.

　　III

　　In Su Xinping's art, the relationship between individual time and historical time is not only embodied in the struggle between internal and external, but also in the unending, cyclical dialogue between the "I" of the present and the "I" of the past. This dialogue bestows Su Xinping' art with clear experimental traits. Eight Things is the first part of Su Xinping's "landscape of mental imagery." It ponders the question we asked at the beginning, which is how an image can preserve the tension between individual memory and the abyss of history. In the painting, he concretizes this experimental dialogue as the uncertain process of revising an image, using "unfinishedness" to resist the sense of completion and concept of the end of an artwork. For Su Xinping, this process is one of discarding all conditions and suppositions of painting to "smear" the paint according only to feeling and notions. This is also a dialogue between the present "I" and time, in what one critic has described as "automatism": "The so called 'thing' here is an abstract answer to 'subject' and 'result.' When it cannot be recognized as any specific object, 'it' becomes a 'thing'. These 'eight things' seem to be magnifications of trees or smoke clouds from his earlier landscape works, but they are not anything of substance at all, only the further abstraction of the 'landscape' ? In this way, Eight Things becomes art without an end. This highly resembles his situation in his early years, when he spent his days buried in the lithography studio. The only difference is that this time, the locked memories, receding horse and self-portrait no longer exist, but the subject awareness has been further refined as a clear goal" (Sheng Wei).

　　In the fourth exhibition hall, we present the "traces" of this automatic experimental process through "uncompleted" paintings, videos, sketches, even scrap paper used to wipe paintbrushes. They are no longer "finished products" of time but folds that time cannot open. Thus, in this place, time is no longer a ritual but an "expanse" that connects past, present and future, and this series of artworks alludes to the unpredictable future of Su Xinping's art.

　　In the era of mass image reproduction, Su Xinping has, in his painting, doggedly resisted the temptation of fashionable imagery, kept his distance from entertainment and games, and refused the production of flattened, reproducible and spectaclized images. Whether in his early realist figure paintings or his recent semi-abstract landscapes, he has always strived to bestow his works with a certain psychological order. He has persisted in using symbolic techniques and "outdated" painting techniques in order to preserve the traces of memory. Between symbolism, expressionism, surrealism and even ancient religious images, he has overcome the challenge to thought raised by desire, resisting the swallowing of individual time by historical time and commercial time to create a world of symbols.

　　August 29, 2015

作者：Huang,Zhuan