The sun shone high in the sky, and the boundless grassland gave out dazzling light.

There was a tree in the courtyard of the CPC Committee of Wulanchabu Prefecture, wherefrom one could gaze into the end of the sky without anything in the middle. On top of the tree often sat a boy, whose eyes would stare at the distance beyond the rows of low houses in the courtyard. The world was a complete tranquility except the changes of the clouds and light, with occasionally a passer-by leaving a long and lonely shadow on the ground. Although the tree was not tall, the boy was able to enjoy absolute peace and forget the worldly worries and bothers, thereby getting rid of the impact of the tempest and pressure of that time.

Sometimes, he could see in his heart those things sleeping in the depth. They slept in the bottom of the heart, where the primitive power unknown to man silently circulated and repeated. More often, he looked at the distance, wondering what lied at the end of the horizon and what were in the other side of the mountain. Now and then, he could hear the soundless rhythm coming from that far faraway place and going to the abysmal depth of the world. Such internal experiences were soul-stirring to a boy. Once he came down, the experiences on the tree become a secret pain of the kid.

Su Xinping's parents came to Inner Mongolia in the 1950's and he was born in Jining City of Inner Mongolia, which neighbors Mongolia to the north and which was therefore a frontline of the battle again the Soviet Revisionists in the 1960's. That his papa had a gun and the family had newspapers, these are Su Xinping's memories of his childhood. The everyday life in the courtyard did not have the Mongolian activities in one's imagination, like horse racing, wrestling and arrow shooting. The romantic Mongolian life of singing and dancing came into the eyes of Su Xinping only when he got access to the then-popular folk paintings of the frontier regions after he came to study in a fine arts academy.

In his childhood, his family lived in an adobe. Every year in the summer, when there was a storm, the rain, like hundreds and thousands of sky-breaking glass needles, would penetrate the roof, as if menacing to melt the adobe of the family into the waves of the ocean of rain. With this horrible and palpitating fear, Su Xinping experienced the worldly coldness and warmth. In the end of the 60's, there broke out in Inner Mongolia a bloody and cruel campaign to dig out the so-called "People's Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia". Although the campaign did not affect his family, it did plunge the young and unsophisticated Su Xinping into deep terror.

By that time, he was already used to sitting on the tree that linked the world and the sky, and let his soul wander in the faraway skyline. It was from that tree in the courtyard that certain relationship between the experiential feeling and the transcendental questioning took place in Su Xinping's soul. From then on, that relationship, that linkage with space, has always been alive in the artistic life of Su Xinping and has become an essential resource of his work.

In 1979, Su Xinping was admitted into Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. His previous experience of painting propaganda murals and making newspaper title designs in the military, led him into choosing art as his way of living.

It was then the "New Period" of Chinese revolution and construction after the "Cultural Revolution". The core of the "New Period" awareness that extensively existed within various social classes in the end of the 1970's and the early 80's was a fervent aspiration for "modernization" backed by "science and democracy". The opening awareness required for the target and process of "modernization" brought about huge and sustained waves of the introduction of western culture and thoughts. In 1979, Shao Dazhen published a series of articles that presented modern art in the west, which trespassed the forbidden zone of several decades, making cultural preparations for the artistic explorations in the 1980's.

The intellectual liberation and cultural transformation of the 70's and 80's was the background of Su Xinping's first knowledge of art. He came out for study, like a snail out of his shell, looking forward to understanding the sea and understanding the world. The strange sea was a city covered with the dust of history, a space completely different to his hometown where grassland was followed by grassland. The strange world was the art circle with intermingling values and ideas. As a result of the almost simultaneous introduction and dissemination of centuries of western cultural fruits, and with the continual pouring in of various artistic views, art schools and large numbers of artists and their works, many who did not know the "outside world" felt excited and bewildered. So was Su Xinping, still a novice in print-making , who had almost no idea of either the lineage of European history of art and culture, nor the tradition of modern print-making in China from the new woodcut movement to the revolutionary woodcut of the liberated areas and to the print-making practice in the 1950's.

Between the end of the 1970's and the middle of the 1980's, the production of Chinese prints entered a third peak after that of the 40's and the 50's and 60's. The most influential print artists of that time were mainly middle and old aged painters emerged in the two previous production peaks. The prints themselves had a historical turn too, with the mainstream being the presentations of easy and pleasant folk customs, which aimed at detaching printmaking from a state of auxiliary instrument in the "Cultural Revolution". The printmaking education Su Xinping received then was the "from life to art" method and the style of "art reflecting life", whose ultimate pursuit was to produce a good representation of the flavor of life and personality. Four years later, the conflict between the natural and plain quality shown in the graduation woodcut piece of Su Xinping and the aesthetic mannerist taste reflected the regulating power of the mainstream art of the printmaking world on him.

However, that art, which sought satisfaction in details and which stayed within the trivial, superficial and academic barriers, did not work in harmony with the nature of Su Xinping, and clashed with the artistic views he was about to form. Just at that time, Kent, an American printmaker, lit, like a flash, the light in Su Xinping's heart, wherein he saw his desire to melt within his prints the nature and his inner power. The prints of Kent showed him a solemn and dignified artistic realm, a supreme sensational affection, a source of love and creativity, and a form that allowed the fullest development of individuality. That transcendental value of mankind deeply arrested Su Xinping, though at that time he still could not make it the supporting pillar in his spiritual world. In the meanwhile, Su Xinping introspected, from the then most popular "scar art" and "rustic realism", that folk custom printmaking was faraway from the social reality and what people were thinking about, and had lost the grasp on the total spirit of the age.

In 1983, Su Xinping returned to Inner Mongolia after four years of artistic tour and had a teaching post in the Fine Arts Department of the Normal University of Inner Mongolia, which, located in the capital Hohhot, was the earliest higher education institution setup in a minority ethnic region since 1949, with the task of promoting the training of higher education teachers in that ethic region. But those were not the reasons for Su Xinping's return to Inner Mongolia, across the immeasurable distance between central China and the frontier.

In the several years to follow, Su Xinping paid visits to the grassland almost every year, which looked like the practice of "going deep into life" and "collecting life elements in the country", then popular in the art world.

Su Xinping simply wanted to get closer, and still closer to the grassland, close enough for him to smell the fragrance of the grass, a fragrance of the wild beings of the earth, and a fragrance with which he grew up and got more and more distant in his urban life. When he came back to the grassland and silently felt again the early-year inner experiences on top of the tree, in the tender voice of the earth, he seemed to have found an understanding friend for that boy after about 10 years. Artists of his time found rich elements of life on the grassland and the splendid Mongolian culture, but what Su Xinping found was himself, and what he "went deep into" on the grassland was his lonesome soul, rather than "life" itself. It was on the grassland that Su Xinping molded the creative thinking of his art.

The grassland belongs to everyone; it is heavy and isolating. It is a sound that cannot be transmitted, a lonely movement that will finally turn one's dream into bubbles.

Su Xinping discovered, in his lonesome tour of the grassland, that what appealed to him was not the fresh life or the lively scenes of the Mongolian herdsmen, but the motif of the sky, the earth and man. Thus there arose from Su Xinping's feeling of past experiences the love and respect for the sky and the earth. This awakening of transcendental values stimulated by the vast grassland was very important to Su Xinping's life. In his future attitude toward art, he would always take the spiritual experiences acquired in the grassland as a way to question the souls of himself and his contemporaries, and make unique observations on the spiritual phenomena of the Chinese-Mongolian-contemporaries.

Several years later, besides the magnetic call of the grassland, another cultural city again gave Su Xinping that unexplainable call, and that city was Beijing.

In 1986, Su Xinping passed the entrance examination and became a graduate student of the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). That year was the year the "85 New Wave Art" was violently unfolding. In the ensuing three years, modern art groups emerged one after another, and various exhibitions, manifestos and articles came into sight like whirlwinds. The New Wave Art generally refers to the explorative and experimental movement of China's modern art formed in the art world between 1980-89, which made references to modern art forms of the west. The rise of the New Wave Art originated from the deepening of the intellectual liberation movement and was a response to the ideological demand for "realizing modernization". It profoundly changed the status quo and development trend of Chinese art since the "New Period", and was a cultural phenomenon with typical Chinese characters within the context of China. Su Xinping was not involved in that modern art movement with characters of enlightenment and collectiveness. He was, by distance and silence, isolated in a world of his own - the workshop of CAFA where he concentrated upon lithograph. Works like Young Girl, Morning to Dusk, the Shepherd Boy and the Mother and Kid (1986) showed that in the beginning he touched upon the styles of description and lyric expression too. However, these early year lithographs already unveiled the typical art pattern of Su Xinping: conspicuous individual figures and a void physical space, and surreal imaginations with realistic representations.

Dominant then in CAFA was a fine art trend that paid attention to form and technique and stressed implications and styles, while formally there were western classicism and western impressionistic or expressionistic styles, as well as more abstract forms and the surrealistic style. Though Su Xinping was able to study in depth the forms of lithograph in such an atmosphere of fine art, he nevertheless could not pursue an art language as a pure realm or a perception of scientific rationality. He was enchanted in creating a hollow sense of light with the language of lithograph. His early year psychological experiences in the grassland and his present cultural relation with the contemporary society interwove, like two threads, to form the conspicuous sense of loneliness and heaviness in Su Xinping's lithographic language. Thus, Su Xinping's progress in art had a root, based not on the relationship between one art form and another, nor on the relationship between art and society, but deeply and firmly on the relationship between art forms and individual experiences and social culture.

No wonder he was able to, after some two years of engaging with lithograph, produce representative works like the Recumbent Man and the Leaving White Horse (1988), which links past experiences and the transcendental questioning, and embodies childhood impression and adult knowledge. In this piece, the man and the horse, the pole and the skyline, and the mysterious strong light and its projection are not the arrangement and rhetoric piling up of certain phenomena in life. The realistic modeling language retains in them a sense of visual reality, which would act upon the audience's intuition and sensation. In the meantime, Su Xinping exhausts the physical space of the background, and the agilely arranged and presented time-spatial relationship and host-guest relationship of the figures provides the whole picture with a greater flexibility. For instance, the meeting of black and white in the picture is not arranged according to focal perspective essential in a realist painting; it looks like a skyline, but reminded one of the edges of a star. The sky is dark, but the strong light on the ground and its projection do not make one think it was night, but rather lead one to associate it with the grand universe. Most worthy of pondering is the relationship among the figures in the picture. Obviously, Su Xinping consciously gave up the arrangement of these figures, and depicted them with an even weight. These figures have escaped the plot, and even escaped the focal perspective way of viewing, leaving large areas of aesthetic blank among the figures, leading the audience himself to link them and supplement the blank, to understand the intention of the painter. The psychological, cultural and spiritual implications float dimly within that decentered and centerless structure of the picture. That is the most appealing part of Su Xinping's lithograph, that it depicts but not does not rigidly adhere to the objects, leading one to associated ideas and imaginations from the depicted to the non-depicted, and finally constructs, with an unreal scene, the spiritual power to dialogue with the reality. This attainment of his is the result of several years of tempering of the schema and language.

At about the same time, a voice for "purifying language" came out in the art circle, against the bold and superficial trends in the New Wave Art. It was a self-reflection and examination from within modernism upon the New Wave Art, with reference to western modernism, which took formal creativity as its precursor and theoretical foundation, and it had within itself the efforts to search for the language of Chinese modern art at large and the humanistic meanings that would transcend social utility. One of its implied theoretical questions was: what is the supporting point of value for Chinese modern art?

In October 1988, in a joint exhibition with his colleague Lu Shengzhong, Xu Bing, also from the Printmaking Department of CAFA, showed his installation work, Book from the Sky. It was a type-printed Book from the Sky of over two thousand Pseudo Characters, either printed on 10m long rice paper and hung unscrolled, or bound in the form of thread-bound Chinese books. The exhibition space was piled up with the forms of traditional thread-bound books, long scrolls and big-character posters. At that time, the Book from the Sky not only shocked the art world with its delicate production and ultimate purity of visual language, but also, with the 480,000 Pseudo Characters that could not be read, breached the established cultural concepts and the stereotyped ways of thinking, making it, conceptually, a Comprehensive Words to Admonish the World against the Chinese cultural world in the 1980's. Su Xinping watched that piece, which according to critics had grafted the "New Wave" and the "Academy", and saw in it the self-transcendence Xu Bing achieved in the process of inscribing the characters, through which he entered a pure and free spiritual realm; that process is one in which the artist realize his ideas, and a practical road to shake off the cultural dilemma.

The year 1989 was a turning point not only for Chinese society, but also in the development of Chinese art. It was at this breaking moment that Su Xinping established his own artistic features in the printmaking circle and the art world.

In February that year, the Great Wasteland, a lithograph of Su Xinping, took part in the Exhibition China/Avante-Garde. In this event that marked the end of the modern art movement in China in the 1980's, Su Xinping made his emergence on the stage of Chinese art with his void and lonesome grassland, silent and introspective man and mysterious light. In April the same year, he took part in the Exhibition of Young Printmakers from Mainland China in Taiwan and was awarded the grand prize. In July, he took part in the Seventh National Art Exhibition and won a bronze prize. The next year, his works were collected by the British Museum and the Asia Pacific Museum of the US.

It was also in 1989 that Su Xinping completed his graduate study and stayed as a teacher in CAFA. Motif and Space - Expressive Meaning and Expressive Language of Painting, his graduation treatise, was published in the no. 11 issue of the Art magazine in 1989. By then the spiritual space with symbolic meanings that he created had become Su Xinping's style recognized by the printmaking circle. In the several years to follow, he produced large numbers of lithographs like the Shadow series, the Quiet Town series, the Spacious and Void Grassland series, the Untitled series, the Dialogue and the Walking Man. In 1990, Su Xinping held a personal prints show in Hong Kong; in 1991, he had a personal lithograph show in Shanghai Art Museum, and in 1992 he had a personal exhibition in China National Art Museum.

Su Xinping's "coming to the stage" was right at a turning moment of Chinese art from the 1980's to the 90's and his development, from the outset, represented in a certain sense the turning and changes of contemporary art in China. In the early 90's, the "New Generation", who were mainly young painters newly graduated from art academies, became the first art trend after the ending of the New Wave Art. The emergence of the New Generation not only reflected the changes of the reality in Chinese society in the 90's, but also symbolized the tracing back of Chinese art from the west to the native, the fall from collectivism to individual values and the tendency to return from ideological utopia to current social reality. There were many similarities between Su Xinping and the New Generation painters: both of them were artists graduated from art academies, who had looked on the rise and fall of the New Wave Art in their school years, and similarly they expressed their personal feelings towards life with the realistic techniques they received in an academy; in the eyes of the critics, they constituted the reflections upon the modernist movement in the 80's. In terms of the relations between individuals, both Su Xinping and the New Generation painters had the tendency to be alienated from the outside world, and similarly they returned to personal state of existence and meditated on the reality from a personal perspective. However, they were different in terms of the relationship between art and the reality, and that made Su Xinping what Su Xinping would be and made his art creation a genuine personal activity.

Representative painters of the New Generation exposed closely the situation of reality and pursued a concrete and direct truth. Almost on the contrary, Su Xinping searched certain intentions and the meaning of expression with realistic modeling, to symbolize the true environment of life of the artist with a virtual artistic scene. To put it in his own word, it was a "dimensional comprehensive field of vision that engulfs both phenomena of life and a certain idea above that phenomena". (Su Xinping: Motif and Space) The former aimed at achieving a realistic scene, and the latter meant to construct a realm of the soul, and that was the fundamental difference between Su Xinping and the New Generation painters. Amongst the pervasive belief crisis and the spiritual bewilderment in the early 90's, Su Xinping firmly sustained his own thinking and feeling through his affirmation of spiritual truth.

In those years, Su Xinping collected, with lithograph, his early year experiences and the various experiences he acquired in his life in Tianjin and Beijing; painting, just like that tree in the courtyard, helped him establish a personal domain true to his own, within which Su Xinping established self-consciousness and his own subjectivity, and defined his self-identity. In fact, self-identity is a two-way confirmation; it is the identifying of not only one's self, but also of the relation between oneself and the other. Within this double relationship, each individual is concerned with himself and makes reference to the other. Even the most immanent individual subjectivity is linked with the other, and with the public. Su Xinping's works in the early 90's transformed the relationship between the artist, the painting and the audience into an intimate relation between the heart and an individual interested in humanity, self recognition, and sympathy. In the process of presenting the immanent spiritual world of an individual, Su Xinping allows us to participate in the conscious activity of the artist himself.

After he established a clear consciousness of self, Su Xinping did not cling to the individuality. He wanted to establish a relationship with the other that is outside of self, and to make linkage between the personal domain in his art and the public domain. Again, it was art that helped him.

In the 1990's, particularly after 1993, the modernization process of China moved rapidly forward at an irreversible pace and China has become a member far from the the center of the globalization scene. Since 1993, market has become an important, no-longer-anonymous parameter in the cultural scene of China. Commercial operation and market activity have rewritten to a rather great extent the original power structures and ways of operation, and overseas galleries, private galleries and contemporary western art institution began to engage themselves in the exhibiting, curating and marketing of Chinese art. That provided opportunities for Su Xinping to exhibit his oevre overseas. In 1993, 1994 and 1995, he held a number of personal exhibitions and took part in group shows in Australia and the US. However, at that time Su Xinping did not foresee the challenges that the transition in contemporary Chinese society would bring to him.

While overseas, what Su Xinping first encountered was the impact of different artistic values and ideas, and he received the "re-education" of artistic ideas in a wide range of museums, art museums and galleries. Once, Su Xinping had a half-year stay in New York, where, when he had leisure, he would visit the galleries. The thousands of New York galleries is a huge and multi-layered commercial system. He toured several famous gallery areas, paying visits to experimental galleries who had played important roles in the development of contemporary art in Europe and America, and encountered commercial galleries of different sizes.

Nonetheless, it was the Metropolitan Museum that Su Xinping visited most often, as it contained the root of his art education. Seeing so many masters in several hundreds of years in western art history gathering in one place, where one is confronted with spiritually and technically insurmountable peaks almost everywhere. He could not help wondering whether how to paint was still a true question. It had been quite a long time that Su Xinping took as his artistic aim the tempering of pictorial language, and he started, besides lithograph, to explore his own oil painting art from the 1980's; therefore, the more concentrated he was in the museum, the more complete his questioning of himself: style is not only man itself, it is also everything around him. Without that atmosphere into his painting, that painting would be a dead one, dead because it cannot breathe. He started to think what after all it was to be an artist, and what process it was for an artists to achieve self-fulfillment, thereby rethinking the meaning and position in history and in reality of what an artist does.

In the end of 1993, at a large Freud Retrospective, Su Xinping was deeply struck. It was from Freud that he found the coordinates of his work: 1. figurative painting, 2. extending the brush into the psychological state and life of his contemporaries, 3. engaging contemporary social by individual means. What Su Xinping rediscovered in a retrospective of Freud was not the painting technique Freud used to present human figures, but the question of how figurative painting should return to contemporary society by individual means. Freud, who painted without paying attention to the outside, did not focus on that question, which, however, emerged several decades later in a new cultural setting. To Su Xinping, who was on an overseas visit, that cultural setting was the lineage, situation and trend of western contemporary art, as well as the cultural ideology in western contemporary art institution. He saw in figurative painting, which was marginal in western contemporary art, the possibility to engage Chinese society. Starting from an artistic issue of concern to himself, Su Xinping adjusted his relation with the international art world and established the direction of creating an art with contemporaneity in the face of the reality of China.

When Su Xinping returned to Beijing with a clearly defined artistic idea, China was undergoing a tremendous social change and structural transformation. He found, to his surprise, that before his eyes was a pragmatic and commercialist social reality that seemed to have landed overnight. Market laws and interest principle were beginning to become the basic logic and momentum of social life, manifested as a torrent of incessant money and desire, involving everything on the way and becoming the ultimate and effective measure of value in social life. It was also a crucial moment of the division and reorganization of social classes in China in a period of transition, in which the violent tide of consumerism swept away and rewrote the values and everyday life in both the urban and rural part of China, with the ways and content of consumption being the external representations of the ever-radical social stratification of China. Such an ideology of consumption, which affected the formation of individual subjectivity, forced Su Xinping, just as others, to feel the great pressure for money, while ideals, virtues and passion which he relished became worthless in the circulation and consumption of commodities. The challenges posed on artists by the social transformation of China in the 1990's are multi-dimensional. It signifies the complex dilemma of the artists in the process of radical social reorganization. Moreover, with the transformation of Chinese society and the reconstruction of the new world order after the end of the Cold War, cultural issues facing artists also have undertaken great changes. Whether artists could convert their art production into an organic component of contemporary social transition and let art, as a cultural institution in the public sphere, play its revolutionary, spiritual and balancing powers in China's reality, has become a frontline question in the development of China's contemporary art, as well as the subject matter in the construction of China's cultural modernity. With the expansion of global capital from the center to marginal areas, cultural values and fashions that centered on America are penetrating marginal areas, producing in the meantime resistance, interpenetration and the interblending between the marginal cultures and the mainstream culture. The development of future world culture depends to a large extent on the interaction between globalization and localization. Since the 1990's, the contemporary thoughts and culture of China have been inevitably dragged into the historical tide of globalization, while the construction of contemporary thoughts and culture of China have been trying to reinforce with various means the nation-state identity, to construct localized Chinese intellectual foundations.

In the latter half of the 1990's, the trend to return to social reality in China's contemporary art was not the return from western modernism to various "ideological arts" manifested as the concern for reality, nor a passive response to preserve local features under the impact of globalization, but a return to Chin's own social reality, a return to a road of particular art creations by the Chinese, with its eyes on internationally common cultural issues, founded on global economy and cultural structure. Only that cultural formation that runs synchronous to the status quo of contemporary society and cultural situation of China will be able to become an important power in the reorganization of a new international cultural structure, and realize the possibility of cultural self-fulfillment and equal dialogues in the global art space.

Su Xinping's production turned from introspective spiritual reality to the external social reality of China. In 1992, he painted with oil the motif of the lithograph Inside and Outside the Room (1990), which allows us to examine the process of the turn of Su Xinping's art.

On the two pictures with a span of two years, there is the same adobe and similarly a scene before the door, as if a realistic documentary has aimed its lens at the same site that it portrayed two years before. Let us see what changes has taken place in the two year: the owners of the room have changed - a staring man in a suit takes the place of the Mongolian fellow standing and meditating at the same place, with his pale and void face showing naked desires; the roughly depicted Mongolian woman without sex characters in the lithograph has been replaced by a specific and sexy female. The atmosphere in the room has changed too - the plain and mysterious background in the lithograph has become a deeply troublesome and worrying illusion. In terms of art language, the lithograph two years earlier were rendered only in the two colors of black and white, and the author filtered out again and again the surface elements of the objects, until making the whole picture general, neat, simple and grand. Although in the oil painting Su Xinping too reorganized and made subjective arrangement of the images based on his needs, rendering in it characters of print thinking and presentation, the images in the oil painting nevertheless appear noticeably more detailed and chaotic, without the original spirituality and mysteriousness, taking place of which is a worldly and extrinsic realistic phenomenon, despite that all of them are also depicted with a surrealistic and symbolic language. Furthermore, Su Xinping consciously uses the characters of oil painting language to generate a detailed description of the female in the picture, wedging into the general and symbolic picture a concrete and realistic figure. Inside and outside the room, immanent conflicts are everywhere. Actually, when we recall his lithograph produced two years before, those unbalanced local figures in Mongolian robes had already foretold the inside-to-outside transition of Su Xinping's experiences.

When he returned from overseas, he had conceptually realized the social and personal functions of art in social transition, and realized that either classicism, modernism or postmodernism, they are the "realism" of the age they are in. Hence, he pulled his artistic ideal back to the social life of contemporary China from traditional aesthetic and art production conceptions, focusing instead on creating works with a sense of this particular age and with spiritual height. In the meantime, Su Xinping could not help having a dissatisfaction and a passion close to anger, by the fact that in real life the cruel and naked scenes of desires in the age of Balzac were to be found everywhere, almost like copies of the original story. He said at that time:

That sense of dissatisfaction is against a particular social reality, and also against human beings at large, the existing state of man, the humanistic quality of man, the spiritual quality of man and the height of art. That sense of dissatisfaction pushes me to continuously impose pressure on myself, to ask myself difficult questions, and to find turning points for myself. That sense of dissatisfaction often becomes an agitation, a sense of worry, an explosive power and a sense of mission.

-- Interview with Su Xinping and Zhang Xiaojun on August 8, 1995, in Art Archive (Mei Shu Wen Xian), no.1, 1996.

Internally there was a clearly defined artistic view; externally there was the radically reorganizing social reality. Therefore the 1990's became the second peak of production with the full input of Su Xinping's body and soul. The Sea of Desire series are his important representative works of that time. The Sea of Desire is a metaphor of the transitional Chinese society. Before the flooding material desire, the similarly high-raised hands look like a big chorus, lifting from the sea of desire volcanic-magma-like billows. That was the social reality that Su Xinping observed from his personal experiences, and he used figures that either jump into the sea or run in panic to signify that his contemporaries have again lost themselves in a historical transformation, and lost essential cultural resources and spiritual impetus in the re-formation of modern society.

Although this series are still a bit crude, the insight on the relationship between art and social culture is quite clear. It is the fruitation out of the communicating and impacting of the artist's soul with the society, and the first attempt to boldly take to action what this generation of Chinese artists should do and to explore how to do it, after thinking the question of what exactly an artist is in the world. This step that Su Xinping took was founded on the mutation of his artistic methodology brought about by his sensitiveness of the social and cultural conditions based on his individual reality of existence. The mutation that took place to the art of Su Xinping was probably not a single incidence, and its development and maturing in the future will eventually answer the fundamental question raised in the 1980's: what is the supporting point of value for Chinese modern art?

The contemporaneity of the Sea of Desire series lie not in that they accurately present a development of contemporary society and current period, nor that they express the spiritual state and emotional reality of contemporary Chinese, although the artists' response to and visual interpretation of the time are also very important. Su Xinping firmly fixes his artistic orientation upon his attitude toward real life and his understanding of social reality. The idea itself in these works is an organic component of Chinese culture today, and maybe be regarded as an organic part of contemporary thoughts in China, for the works not only have artistic values, they could also stimulate the audience to think about the contemporary cultural situation, and may be a social alarm against the destructive and disastrous elements in the flood of money and material. In the transition of modern society, art as a cultural institution in the public domain plays not only a role of instrument, but also a mediating role. Art is at first hand a meditating means to establish a communicative relation between an individual and an individual, between an individual and the other, and between an individual and the community. Secondly, as a critical discourse of cultural ideology, it plays a meditating role in the construction of cultural modernity. The contemporaneity of the Sea of Desire series is reflected in the energy they have in the communication and dialogue within contemporary culture.

Although the Virtual Sun series that Su Xinping produced afterwards are more refined in terms of the oil painting language, and its subject, which focuses on the everyday family conditions, may not be said to be inaccurate, the relation between the individual mental discourse of the works and the social culture is nevertheless not adequately adjusted, and their artistic pattern fails to produce a "mediating form" that could penetrate the intersubjectivity relationship of man. It is therefore less strong than the Sea of Desire in terms of the energy in the dialogue within contemporary culture, and also weaker than the Banquet series produced in the same period.

Within the numerous figures in the picture frames of the Sea of Desire series and the Banquet series, there is also an absent presence - the lost spiritual subject. Zhuangzi uses three objects, the hub, the vessel and the window to explain that their essential existence as objective things is shown in their utility, and their utility is determined by their void space, or the hub cannot accept the shaft, the vessel cannot hold things and the windows cannot ventilate. It seems that the spiritual subject that are not present in the pictures is the basis for the essential existence of the serial works like the Sea of Desire, and it forms a public sphere - what the author termed the "spiritual space, psychological space". Through his production, the individual experiences of Su Xinping entered that public sphere; and, through viewing, the individual private feelings of the audience also entered this public sphere, thus, in the process of mutual contemplation, Su Xinping and his audience undergo self-reflections respectively. The critical power of the serial works like the Sea of Desire therefore rests not in a social critique on an ethical basis, but in the reflection on self-identity, and then in the reflection on modernity, which is a local as well as a more global issue. Since the 1990's, the intellectual circle of China began to examine and rethink modernity as a structure that contains immanent conflicts. The trend to return to the social reality of China in  contemporary art has formed a modernity discourse with rather a historical particularity, the understanding of which should be done within the total discourse of Chinese modernity. And that is a self-retrospective insight and a self-reflective perspective that the serial works like the Sea of Desire provides us.

The serial works like the Sea of Desire foreground with great numbers of concrete figures the spiritual subject absent in the pictures, and this pattern of presentation is a continuum in Su Xinping's art. We might as well take a look back at his lithographs produced in a previous period, when he was foregrounding the extra-pictorial psychological, cultural and spiritual implications with void and lonesome material space in the picture. As a painter who has undergone for a long time the tempering of his pattern and language, Su Xinping knows that the nothingness of a vessel is possible only with something around it.

In the process of the transformation of artistic mode of thinking, Su Xinping retains his own keynotes. The spiritual and experiential space originated from the tree in the courtyard has always been with him, and it, like an organism, is continually expanding and developing with its own features. With the help of art, he has transcended rationally paradoxical forms such as universality and particularity, individuality and collectivity, and realized, on the basis of retaining individuality, the socialization of an artistic individual, stressing the public characters of art rooted in individual existence. On the road to return to social communication, art is able to encounter the core issues in the cultural construction of contemporary China, and to help the search for necessary cultural resources and spiritual impetus for the reconstruction of a modern society.

In 2002, Su Xinping again re-painted the motif of Inside and Outside the Room. Again the scene out of the windows frame changed: the numb male and female figures and the prosperous distant view, again form an immanent conflict...

作者：Song,Xiaoxia