The Shenzhen Art Museum will host the exhibition On Tao, Tracing the Origin: The Art of Xu Lei in Halls 1 and 2 on the first floor from March 25, 2025. Curated by Tan Shengguang, a senior curator of the Tsinghua University Art Museum, this exhibition is organized by the Shenzhen Art Museum and co-organized by the YING Center for Contemporary Art. The exhibition showcases the most important works from various periods of Xu Lei's career, marking his first large-scale thematic exhibition with a retrospective nature in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area.
Since the 1980s, within the diverse landscape of contemporary Chinese art, Xu Lei’s artistic practice has consistently exhibited a distinctive philosophical depth. His work is grounded in the dialogue between tradition and modernity, reconstructing the relationship between history and the present through visual language. Curator Tan Shengguang has dissected the layered structure of Xu Lei's work, revealing how the artist reinterprets the modern fate of traditional aesthetics through his spiritual trajectory. Titled ‘On Tao, Tracing the Origin’, the exhibition traces the spiritual lineage of Chinese classical aesthetics through Xu Lei’s four-decade-long artistic journey. By invoking the five dimensions of literary creation articulated in Wenxin diaolong (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) — such as tixing (style and nature), shensi (spiritual thought), yinxiu (the recondite and the conspicuous), rongcai (editing of ideas), and tongbian (continuity and renovation) — the exhibition presents Xu Lei’s ongoing engagement with inheritance, transformation, and reinvention of Chinese classical aesthetics and its great artistic tradition.
Notably, Tan Shengguang astutely identifies the wisdom of rongcai in Xu Lei’s artistic practice: he employs the philosophy of Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean) to navigate the aesthetic tensions between East and West, embedding a profound dialectical logic within the overlap of temporal and spatial languages. Xu Lei does not perceive ancient art as a static heritage but rather as a fluid structure. Through continuous deconstruction and reconfiguration, he strips away the superficial textures of cultural symbols, distilling a shared cognitive framework and revealing a universal sculptural will, which ultimately intertwines into a new network of meaning within his compositions. Furthermore, Tan Shengguang points out that Xu Lei’s art ultimately engages with a grander proposition: how can tradition be reborn within modernity? In Xu Lei’s practice, tongbian is not merely a reconciliation of past and present, but rather a thorough creative transformation. By forging a ‘synchronic structure of past and present’, he opens up new spiritual dimensions, blending the rigorous discipline of Tang and Song court paintings, the order of Persian miniatures, and the solemn forms of medieval iconography, into a transcultural, global ‘visual language’.
Through his personal practice and the following generation of artists who have embraced the paradigm he has pioneered, Xu Lei has demonstrated what Tan Shengguang describes as ‘the eternity of tradition lies in its ceaseless rebirth’. Tan Shengguang’s research serves as a prism, refracting Xu Lei’s artistic practice into a broader intellectual spectrum. Within the tension between ‘revival’ and ‘innovation’, Xu Lei’s art resembles an ancient tree sprouting new branches — its roots deeply embedded in the fertile soil of Chinese artistic tradition, while its foliage reaches toward Jorge Luis Borges’ labyrinths and Samuel Beckett’s absurdity. In the dislocation and suturing of time and space, tradition is no longer a burden but a pair of weightless wings, lifting modern individuals over the fractures of culture.
The exhibition will run until June 15, 2025. During this period, a research catalogue under the same title will be published, accompanied by a series of academic events.
