Xuan Ai (b. 1947) Late Winter at Zoige Plateau signed in Chinese; signed 'Ai Xuan' in Pinyin; dated '2008' (lower left) oil on canvas 55 x 55 cm. (21 5/8 x 21 5/8 in.) Painted in 2008
Chin Der Jyu Gallery, A Collection of Ai Xuan's Paintings, Taipei, Taiwan, 2008 (illustrated, unpaged).
Notes
Ai Xuan began his art training when he enrolled in the high school attached to Central Academy of Fine Arts Preparatory School in 1963. The Cultural Revolution began shortly before his graduation in 1967 and interrupted his formal training. It was in 1973 when Ai Xuan served as an artist stationed in Chungdu Military Zone that he first stepped foot in Tibet. He recalled his first experience of the grandeur and expanse of the remote highlands and his feeling of profound unity in heaven, earth and human life. The tranquil silence of the snowy wildness assaulted his senses, and the emptiness and loneliness brought to his mind a type of pre-historic, primeval beginnings of life itself, somewhere in which time seems to have frozen still. After being enveloped in this type of infinite horizon of indestructible silence, Ai Xuan left conventional realism to create abstracted, evocative images filled with allusions to reflect these complex emotions he felt and embodied it in the scenes of Tibet. Ai Xuan said of his work, "I try to express a very complicated feelingmy paintings aren't simple representations of Tibetan life I'm expressing my own feelings and my own sense of destiny." Since then he developed a close relationship with the misty snow scenes, sequestered cottages, and the innocent faces of the girls of the region and they become the subjects for expressing the artist's inner world. Through them he explores the meaning and value of the vitality in life symbolic of the human condition and spiritual fulfillment in his paintings.
Within this boundless region of utter and unbr oken stillness, Ai Xuan abandoned traditional concepts of realism, striving instead for spirituality and for images that would spark reflection through their metaphoric quality. The complexity of his own thoughts and feelings would be expressed through scenes of Tibet. Ai Xuan once described his work saying: "The feelings I am trying to convey are very complex...my paintings do not simply record the lives of these Tibetans... I'm projecting my own feelings, and my reaction to my own fate." From that point on, Ai Xuan's art would be intimately connected with the white, snowy expanses of this region, its lonely, peaceful dwellings, and the simple innocence in the faces of the Tibetan people. They became the themes through which the artist expressed his own inner world; through them, he explored the meaning of life and the strength of the life force, and his paintings embody the fulfillment to be found in the inner, spiritual life of humanity.
With his very fine brushwork, Ai Xuan presents the broad and majestic vistas of the high Tibetan plateau in Late Winter at Zoige Plateau (Lot 111), though they are not the central point the painting wishes to project. Instead, the artist has refined his presentation of human subjects and his structuring of scene for the purpose of expressing 'the human condition and humanity's relationship with nature.' In the midst of this snowy landscape where few humans appear, a man wearing traditional Tibetan garb stands with his back to the viewer, gazing at the distant mountain peaks, accompanied by a small boy resting against a cloth carrying bag. Rubbing his eyes, the boy seems to be hinting at a dejection he cannot hide due to his young years; his attitude, however, contrasts with the staunch courage of the larger figure, his elder brother, who stands and directly faces the hardships of the boundless land. This adult figure stands outlined in the central space of the composition, as solemn and dignified as a stone stele. The men, against the horizon, each perpendicular to the other, convey a silent, doleful mood, somewhat in the manner of German artist Kathe Kollwitz, in his epic portrayal of the suffering and hardships of the German peasants.
At the same time, the compositional layout and conception of this Ai Xuan work highlight a sense of expectation and aspiration for the future. The central position of the figure in the painting guides the viewer's eye, asking us to gaze into the distance with him. The sentimentality and poetic atmosphere of Ai Xuan's works reveal his admiration for the American Realist painter Andrew Wyeth. Like Wyeth, Ai Xuan too strives to depict poetic scenes expressive of deep and ineffable feelings, along with landscapes specific to a given region and the actual conditions encountered by those who live there. Ai Xuan's realistic portrayals, meticulous brushwork, and rigorous modeling of his human subjects impart a richness of feeling to his work that reflects the complex emotional nature of his subjects.
The professional training that Ai Xuan received forged his exceptional abilities in sketching and shaping forms, which enabled him in later years to produce the exquisite and lyrical depiction of detail we find in works such as this. The large number of realist paintings by Ai Xuan depicting the daily lives of the Tibetans derive from his treks through the high plateau and the sketches he made there. Those were later transferred to canvas, and for that reason, differ greatly from painted studies of still models. Ai Xuan's series of subjects from the Tibetan region bring together a sense of his own travels and his feeling towards the Tibetan ways of life, as revealed in their worn faces and expressions. In the artist's efforts to depict precisely their solitary, lonely condition, he captures as well the nature of their inner being. Ai Xuan, an artist with broad influences from both East and West and a consciously chosen aesthetic outlook, nevertheless, reflects in his work the environments in which humans struggle to survive, and the human spirit upon which they ultimately depend.
