225 - SU XINPING

SU XINPING (1960, Jining; based in Beijing) Morning I Oil on canvas. 130 x 96 cm. Signed lower right. Gallery label on the reverse: Douglas Flanders & Associates, LLC, Minneapolis Su Xinping is vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. As a graphic artist and painter, he applies techniques from Western figurative art to his Chinese cultural context. He has enjoyed an international presence since the groundbreaking 1989 exhibition *China/Avant-Garde* in Beijing. A young woman stands in profile on the Mongolian steppe, tying her headscarf. An everyday gesture, yet Su Xinping places it monumentally in the foreground of the painting: the figure in her long robe extends from the top to the bottom edge of the canvas, while the settlement behind her appears small. There, yurts are nestled in the hills—and both share the same shape. The rounded tent roofs with their smoke stacks mirror the tops of the hills so precisely that dwellings and landscape blend into one another. On the left, one notices a cow about to be milked, for the empty tin bucket for that purpose is already standing ready in the foreground on the right. It is morning, and work has not yet begun. Su Xinping renders the painting almost monochromatic, in olive green, gray-green, and muted ochre. Only the young woman’s face is illuminated by the soft dawn light of the rising sun—a subtle touch of color amid the restraint. This minimalism gives rise to a profound sense of calm, in which the slumbering stillness and solitude of the landscape remain palpable.