Su Xinping

b. 1960, Jining, Inner Mongolia

Printmaker

After graduating from the Painting Department of the Tianjing Institute of Fine Arts in 1983, Su Xingping started his career as a teacher in the Department of Fine Arts of the Inner Mongolia Teachers’ College, an experience that inspired his earliest lithographic works of nostalgic and quiet scenes of vast grasslands and unchanging people. Growing in a period when art was still commissioned as propaganda, Su wanted to keep a distance from politicized art, directing his attention feelings about life and time. Having moved to on individual images extracted from his private printmaking, with a degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (see art academies) in Beijing (1989), he began to work with intimate black-and-white depictions of social transformations during the decade of open policy promoted by Deng Xiaoping, expressing his deepest concern for the issues of isolation and lack of communication among people emerging in the new course.

By means of a smooth and controlled technique he completed Dialogue in 1990, a subject repeated also in 1998. This work reflects the artist’s position in the art trends of the early 1990s, when Cynical Realism was saturating art with feelings of solitary spiritualism, loss of cultural identity and restricted freedom (in whatever sense). Challenged by the increasing pressure posed by the accelerated economic growth, Su’s works of the mid and late 1990s present an in-depth critique to the related psychological concerns, as in the Sea of Desire series. Here he depicts the dissatisfaction and unattainable character of desires in a fast-developing society approaching an open market model of pluralism. Su was nominated as candidate for the UNESCO Award for the Promotion of the Arts in 1993.

Su has exhibited worldwide, featuring in shows like ‘Faces and Bodies of the Middle Kingdom’ at the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague (1997) and ‘Inside Out: New Chinese Art’ at the Asia Society Galleries in New York (1998).

Further reading

(1997). ‘Su Xinping Lithograph—Supplement au No. 203’. Art et Metiers du Livre (May/June).

Kesner, Ladislav (1997). ‘Faces and Bodies of the Middle Kingdom’. In Chinese Art of the 90s: Faces and Bodies of the Middle Kingdom (exhibition catalogue). Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague.

Smith, Karen (1998). ‘Su Xinping at Red Gate Gallery’. Asian Art News (Jan./Feb.).

BEATRICE LEANZA