I mentioned, in the article From Elite to Small Man, which is included in the catalog Inside Out: New Chinese Art, the New Floating World paintings by Su Xinping, Song Yongping and a number of other young artists, because, although they adopt the old style of realism to represent the current Floating World phenomenon in China in a symbolic manner, they nevertheless take as their theme the critique of and the reflections on this phenomenon, despite certain on-going popular tones of Absurdity and Cynicism in their paintings. The current Floating World phenomenon in China does have, to some extent, analogies with the Floating World of the Edo era of Japan, in that the content of life and the aesthetic taste dominating in the life of the masses are influenced by a new emerging rich merchant class.

When I faced with Century Tower, a work of Su Xinping in 1997, I was deeply touched. "(Let me) ask the boundless earth, who actually dominates the rise and fall (of man)?" In that painting, nearly one hundred people, great persons and commoners alike, jostle and scramble on top of one another, as if passionately striving for the "lofty spirit of the proletariats" or for a "completely well-off life". This work may evoke different reactions. For example, one may be moved by the spirit of the 20th century Chinese to persistently fight against different fates of the times, while others might feel that all those are merely nonsense and an extremely absurd "floating life and illusioned world". Su Xinping is a simple and sincere man in search of a nature, not of the type of light-hearted and carefree artists. If his work ever carries any tone of absurdity, they are not conveyed through a cynicism that "handles the heavy as if it were light", but honed from deep, pensive reflections that "handles the light as if it were heavy". Looking at Su Xinping's paintings, one never feels easiness, but heaviness. Behind the works seems to always hide the heavy interrogations of the author, which sometimes is inharmonic with the presentation of the work.

In Quanzhou, Fujian Province, on both sides of the main gate of the Kaiyuan Temple, the inscriptions of these words by Zhu Xi from the Southern Song Dynasty, written down by the Buddhist Master Hongyi, are hung. The words read: "In this land known as the territory of the Buddha in ancient times, the streets are crowded with saints". When I visited the place in 1990, what impressed the most was the sharp contrast between the simple and frugal living and reading room where the Master passed away, which is preserved in the temple, and the passers-by on a bustling street that neighbors the temple, who seemed to be totally occupied with everyday life and business and paid no attention to the affairs inside the Buddhist temple. The contrast between the commoners and the celestial world, with one dynamic and the other tranquil, was so stark that one couldnot help wondering if Master Hongyi meant to mock at the people of Quanzhou when he wrote those phrases as the couplet on the door of the temple. However, I should think otherwise. Master Hong Yi loved Quanzhou and her residents dearly. And I believe that Su Xinping looks at the world with his loving heart too, although all the"saints in the streets" in his paintings have cartoon-like looks.

However, such a contradiction originates from his harmonious works in the 80's that, both in lithographs and oil paintings, apparently showed no such "schizophrenia". Su Xinping's oil paintings and lithographs seemed to have the same subject matter and theme, both depicting the Mongolian lifestyle and the grassland. The succinct setting and the virtual light and shade on the figures suggest man's relationship with nature, the Shaman culture of the Mongolians and their consciousness of nature. He used a reformed surrealistic technique to touch upon and present the Mongolian philosophy on nature and their optimistic, accepting-the-lots philosophy on life.

Su Xinping's oil paintings in the 1980's followed the same compositional and modeling methods of his prints. Obviously, he focused on the modeling language unique to oil painting while attempting to apply that language in the same subject matter. Some typical examples are, A Standing horse (1989), Horse and Shadow (1988) and the Rising Morning Sun (1988), of which the last one was a representative work that perfectly integrates the languages of lithograph and oil painting. The work retains, in terms of the atmosphere, composition and details like the cloth wrinkles and the light and shade, the essential qualities of his prints. However, the rich layering of color and the heavy quality of oil render the painting with greater expressive power whilst still maintaining the harmonious tone.

Around 1990, Su Xinping began to shift his focus of production towards oil painting. The choice of and shift in medium were probably due to the artist's changed mentality and concerns. Su Xinping said goodbye to his infatuation with classicism and gave up the "magic pastoral" method of presentation in lithograph that he has been familiar with. The reason could be that a mentality of helplessness that combined skepticism and fatalism was dominating his works. What followed were dramatic changes in the subject matter and the artistic language of his oil paintings. Signifying such changes were works like Man and Stairs in Blue Background (1990) and Busy People (1991).

Firstly, in terms of composition, the human figures, whether alone or grouped, began to dominate the picture space. If it was a single man, he would stretch from the bottom to the top, and if it was a group of men, they would be arranged in such a manner that they crowded one another, resulting in great compressive force within the frame, leaving little space in the background, making the audience breathless. This sense of oppression is further strengthened by the impetuous and agitated behavior of the human figures. In Busy People, the human figures are seen running aimlessly in all directions. The wrinkles and the shadow on the clothes are noticeably more elaborate and complicated than his prints in the 80's. All these culminate in a sense of insecurity and anxiety. Man and Stairs in Blue Background is obviously the author's self-portrait. With an unsuspecting gaze and arms wide apart, his heavy body pulls him into the sea, expressing a bewilderment resulted from the involuntary fall from the "metaphysical" to the "physical".

Trying to express his own puzzlement and the Ukiyo-e-like world, Su Xinping did not want to label the figures in his paintings as "unrestrainedly degenerated", nor did he mean to depict them as the contemporary "Seven Hermits in the Bamboo" who "remain sober whilst all others are drunken". His starting point was not to model a "type" figure consistent with the social background, but to observe, with a responsible conscientiousness, the life and soul of ordinary people in a "floating world".

From the early 90's to 1998, he produced a number of serial paintings with grouped and single people, known as the Sea of Desire, Expression, Up-Lookers, and the Stranded Man. The figures in these serials are not the representations of people from any one class with certain morality or certain occupation and identity, nor are they self-portraits of the"newly rich" who like to boast with self-ridicule. The characters in Su Xinping's works are commoners of China, and they are always kind, innocent and simple, always without their own ideas and driven by something. They are not intelligent and are even numb, allured by vogues and steered by their "desire". The hands, which are ubiquitous in the background, guide the believers, like the sail of a ship, to brave the wind and the waves. Hands connote numerous meanings to the Chinese, ranging from the many gestures of Buddhism, the hand code in Tantrism, the palmistry in Taoism and the contemporary "Chairman Mao waves us forward".

In the later works of the Sea of Desire series, like No. 27, 28 and 29, the heads floating above the water dominate the picture space. They either greedily breathe the fresh air, or struggle in the whirls, or are faces distorted by squeezing billboards. In the Expression series, Su Xinping used a more realistic or "painting from life" style to depict the details of the face. However, I feel that this process of painting has become a process of the artist to analyze the psychological state of his subjects, as if he wants to learn something from painting these people, and as if he must understand something before representing them. Of course, Su Xinping never intends to teach others to understand something through his paintings.

Since 1998, Su Xinping's production entered another stage and created serial works of Banquet and Vacation, which are different from previous works in that they have specific settings: the banquet table and scenic sights, as well as specific themes of life: eating and vacationing, hence more pictorial elements that can be read. The Chinese cherish eating very much, as expressed in the saying that "food is what the commoner regards as heaven", and everything seems to have something to do with eating, from traditional ceremonies to present-day business. According to scholars, the Chinese character for beauty originates from the two characters for "sheep" and "big", the sheep being a sacrificial object relative to ceremonies and banquets. Thus "beauty" was actually first associated with food before it became the term for aesthetic judgment. While ancient nobilities are known to be gourmets, Confucius himself also remarked that food and sex are the most important for man. However, the craze for food in China today is probably more prevailing than ancient dynasties of Shang, Qin and Han. For the commoners, the banquet is the most common venue for rituals, with its broad functions and scope second to none, either as ritual banquets, business or leisure banquets. Su Xinping's banquets never end, continuing from dawn to dusk, with incessant toasts and cheers, and service of dishes. The sense of eternity, with time and space frozen, in his prints in the 80's are now replaced by the ceaseless transmigration of food and sex. While the former's tranquility is a natural existence, the latter's dynamism is the dasein of human world. Accordingly, Su Xinping changed his color palette, replacing the dull tone in the Sea of Desire with bright hues.

Since that time, Su Xinping produced another serial known as the Vacation. In terms of the language of oil painting, the Vacation is purer than any other previous series, with rich layering of color, and with contrasted fine and bold brushstrokes, which I believe are not out of rational arrangement but of free, spontaneous brushwork. Here, the figures and the landscape are united in a blue (symbolizing dream and ideal) hue, with the water, the rocks, the rainbow, the paper plane and the clouds woven into a poetic narrative. The placement of the family of three retains a surrealistic mood. The seemingly close yet so distant relationship and the mutual emotional refractions among the family members are perfectly rendered. Nevertheless, the plot of the painting is entirely virtual and disjointed. Amidst the warmth and calmness is a suspension. For instance, in Vacation No. 4, the woman and the man (mother and father) stand at two sides of the verge of a cliff, absorbed in their own thoughts rather than admiring the scenery. The carefree boy is about to take off with a paper plane. But the audience does not place their suspension on the youngster, but somewhere outside of the picture.

To put it more accurately, Su Xinping has captured the essence of vacationing, a segment that can best represent the standard Chinese family life of today. The impact of modernization has brought about intrinsic changes in the structure and concept of a family in China, where private and public spaces are being melted, and harmonious atmosphere and inauspicious signs co-exist. Therefore, natural scenery has become a binding agent or cleansing venue that everybody longs for. Consumption drives citizens to rural areas and leisure prompts families to go out of their home. It is not surprising that every scenic spot is increasingly crowded. When vacationing becomes a best way of family life for millions of people, it is given the function of semi-religious rituals, like a fervent pilgrimage, yet not to worship the saints of a place, but to worship the sites where the saints were born.

In both his works of the 80's and the 90's, Su Xinping's productions are always close to reality, which, however, are hard to be labeled any type of realism. Despite that, we can always explore the perspective from which, or the mentality on which he thinks about and present the reality he faces. For instance, in the 80's he put human figures into an abstract nature, while in the early 90's he focused on unclassified standard Chinese as a means to explore, observe and question the Chinese within such a reality. Since the late 90's, he seemed to have placed figures again into specific settings (like banquets and vacations). Families of three are put into a dreamy or illusionary setting to present the mental state of the smallest unit of the Chinese society. Recently, Su Xinping has directed his attention to peasant labors working in cities and painted some figures of this subject matter. Nonetheless, no matter how his perspectives change and whatever his attitude may be towards the figures in his paintings, be it respect, critique or pity, there is always an underlying compassion in his work. In revealing the relationship between man and society, the works suggest a certain suspension, or even anxiety. The reflection on the reality and on man in his paintings is rather from the perspective of fate, than from a moral perspective. Certainly, that is not merely a fate that concerns one single individual Chinese, but all men floating in this "floating world".

作者：Gao,Minglu