1. Making the Metropolis [Overview of Xu's work, circa 2002] Xu Zhongmin works in woodcuts, video installations and performances. Born in Sichuan province in China but now living and working in London , many of his works examine the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. The modern city and its inhabitants, the chaos and the lull, identity and anonymity, lust and greed are rendered tangible in his body of works. Although Xu Zhongmin's varied practice incorporates video installations and performances, he is most often hailed as an important representative of the highly respected art of woodcuts. The artist, born in Sichuan province in China, but now living and working in London, has indeed been instrumental in taking the traditional art form which dates back as far as the Tang dynasty (618-907) into a new realm inspired by the modern metropolises of the twenty and twenty-first centuries. Growing up during the 1960s and 1970s in China , Zhongmin's education and artistic development were interrupted by the onslaught of the Cultural Revolution. Many of Zhongmin's works now examine the legacy of this period. These include ‘The Happiest Day' (1996), in which he uses two film projections, one on his face and one in the background and a historical film depicting Chairman Mao receiving the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square at the start of the Cultural Revolution. The triptych of video projections, ‘Separate Unity' also evokes Zhongmin's life in China . Juxtaposed are an old lady – the artist's grandmother – telling her story, Zhongmin jumping up and down in a narrow box-like corridor and unsettling images relating of his experiences in China . If Zhongmin's feelings are displayed here as constraint, this extended to the restrictions placed upon his chosen artistic medium. For years, woodblock prints were used to illustrate, record and disseminate political propaganda. It was only after the Cultural Revolution ended that artists like Zhongmin were no longer bound by strict ideological guidelines and were able to start experimenting with new forms and modes of expression. Training at the Sichuan Academy from 1983 to 1987, Zhongmin's artistic talents developed in an atmosphere suffused with the excitement of experimentation and discovery that enlivened the art world in China at the time. Zhongmin participated enthusiastically, organising and mounting shows and chairing the the Ba Di Cao Arts Society for several years before its closure in 1989. Within his own practice, Xu Zhongmin began using large-scale etched printing blocks as pieces in their own right to produce abstract works that captured the claustrophobia of the modern world. By the 1990s, his works depicted atmospheric, towering cityscapes that bustled chaotically one moment but fell into a deathly calm the next. In his dramatic five-panel work, ‘City of Dreams' (1998), he employed a narrow colour range of black, brown and white to create a terrifying vision of the world in which people are trapped in a hell of crowded buildings rising cheek by jowl. These woodcuts also reveal the artist's longstanding preoccupation with the line form, a flowing thread, snaking its way in and out of the fragments of interconnected space. Identity, anonymity, face and facelessness in the contemporary urban world are also constant points of reference in Zhongmin's repertoire. In ‘Face' (1997), a performance using film and video projections, the artist projected on to his own image the faces of a hundred people from different ethnic backgrounds. The idea of the modern metropolis built upon the traces of its inhabitants infuses the work ‘Teeth' (1996) in which Zhongmin used casts of teeth taken from people of different age groups to construct towers, three-dimensional equivalents of his carved skyscrapers. A video film of the towers collapsing is projected within a triangular box onto a rich textured wooden surface. A peephole allows the viewer to peer at the decayed, crumbling cityscape. If here a city and its people are falling apart, in Zhongmin's ‘Tidal Wave' (2001), figures are swept across a cityscape, in what might be seen equally as a metaphor for tidal waves of the Cultural Revolution or of the radical transformations sweeping across China today. The sense of a privileged, or in this case, illicit view conjured with the use of spy-holes is also at play in Xu Zhongmin's ‘House of Mah-jong' (2002). The boldly patterned cubed installation is built from thousands of colourful mah-jong pieces which form a ‘house' with peepholes in all four walls. A magic lantern inside the house features an animation film of images of traditional Chinese erotic paintings (‘chun gonghua'). With mah-jong, an immensely popular game in China , now a symbol of rampant gambling, the work entices the viewer to reflect upon issues of temptation and secrecy, lust, wealth and fate. Sources include: ′Dream 02′ catalogue, Red Mansion Foundation, London , 2002 Author: Diana Yeh
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2. A visceral response to art [Review of group exhibition] Pia Pini, “A visceral response to art: The Transvangarde: an Exhibition of Transcultural Art Showing at the October Gallery, London , UK , until Feb 12, 2000,” The Lancet 355 :505-506 (2000) The Guyana-born agronomist and artist Aubrey Williams was said to have hated having to explain his art. He said that it was for “all those who look and feel” and that people should have their own visceral response to painting. And it is difficult not to do just that when looking at any of the works in a new exhibition of transcultural art at London 's October Gallery. Presenting a selection of the best in contemporary art from around the globe, The Transvangarde brings together a rich array of art that, though very different in style, shares a striking vibrancy of colour, light, spirituality, and humanity. The transvangarde as a concept arose because the Eurocentric and US-centric position of the avant-garde movement excluded art of other cultures. Transvangarde (a contraction of “transcultural avantgarde”) thus embraces cuttingedge art by artists from different cultures who at the same time have a sense of belonging to all cultures equally. That this belonging comes to the fore in The Transvangarde is mostly down to the brilliant way that Elisabeth Lalouschek (artistic director of the gallery) has put together the works of the 23 artists that feature in this exhibition – from the rawness of such work as Andrew Bundy's anatomical study My Lover Shows Me Her Back (1999), for which he has just received a juror nomination for the Turner prize 2000, to the simplicity of author William S Burroughs' Mushrooms (1987). … City of Dreams No 3 (1999) [is] a set of five woodcut panels by the Chinese artist Xu Zhongmin that depicts a nightmarish cityscape. There is a Tower of Babel feel to this series, people in never ending pursuit of reaching some higher being. This common motif in art has been with us ever since Pieter Bruegel the Elder and other members of the European movement in the 16th century used this imagery to portray the follies of mankind. The birth of transvangarde art arose through the cultural move of the essentially western avant-garde. Interestingly, several of the artists featured in The Transvangarde no longer live and work in the countries of their birth. For example . . . Zhongmin . . . settled in England from . . . China . Did such a transcultural move encourage the development of the transvangarde? … [etc.]
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3. Xu Zhongmin at the October Gallery [Review of solo exhibition] Ian Findlay, "Xu Zhongmin at the October Gallery." Asian Art News , vol. 8 , no. 3 (May/Jun 1998), pp. 85-86 This show of a selection of large unique wood cuts, covering about a decade of production, by Chinese artist Xu Zhongmin, is an intriguing one. Although essentially abstract in nature, Xu's forceful work fits well within the strong Chinese tradition of woodcut art. Xu's central theme would appear to be that of a claustrophobic modern world in which people appear to be in various stages of panic or entrapment. Xu, working within extremely narrow color range, predominantly black, brown, and white, uses it to the fullest advantage in creating his eerie cityscapes. His vision is one of an architectural hell in which cramped buildings appear to tumble one upon the other. Through his line he creates an atmosphere of such density and narrowness of place that one is reminded of images of over-populated Brazilian favela , or shanty towns, clinging precariously to the sides of hills. At the same time, his line in brown and white adds to the lighting of the set pieces. The figures that populate Xu's world seem to be, in their elongated gestures and shadowy presence, trying to escape their frightening world. Net (1992), is a dramatic five-panel piece, which highlights the drama unfolding within his works. His series Shadows , here only four panels, is dominated again with the darkness and foreboding of tightly packed buildings. Perhaps the most dramatic and certainly intriguing pieces in the show is his City of Dremas (1998), a dramatic large five-panel work which exemplifies clearly all of Xu's technique and skills as a woodcut artist. Here Xu's sense of movement, rhythm, and surface textures through cutting come together in a work that is of the highest quality. Not all of Xu's works suggest this panicked world. City (1985), The Net (1997), and Landscape (1995) suggest exercises in linear structure so that the visual effect from a distance is dramatically different fro that close up. In City Masks (1992) Xu has a different visual impact in mind with these works. Here Xu's images and design are closely related to those which one might find in simple, tribal, textile art. At the same time, it is clear that these images develop further into his later work.
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4. London Report: Art at the handover from: Kitty Lamain, "Art at the handover," Art Asia Pacific , no. 17 (1998), pp. 86-87 [excerpt]: It's not that the British felt terribly distraught at the return of Hong Kong – although without doubt there were those who were. It is characteristic of the majority of dealings with China that media emphasis is on economics and politics, and rarely takes account of culture. In Britain , in the run up to the handover, it was the former that dominated questions being raised and explored in the news. Cultural events surrounding the handover were relatively few … Comparative response between the diasporic nomads and the stay-at-home settlers, and the art it generates, was the theme expressed in Xu Zhongmin and Ye Yongqing's work in ‘Dialogue' at the October Gallery. Both from China , and Xu [this year's winner of the Guinness Prize for Best First-time Exhibitor at the Royal Academy 's Sumer Show] now resides in London , where he has lived, studied and made art since 1992. …
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5. Xu Zhongmin and Ye Yongqing at the October Gallery [Review of duo exhibition] Karen Smith, "Xu Zhongmin and Ye Yongqing at the October Gallery," Asian Art News , vol. 7 , no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1997), p. 98 Since graduating from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1980s, Xu Zhongmin and Ye Yongqing have trodden different paths towards artistic maturity: one remaining within, and one stepping outside their native culture. Their resultant development and the situation in which each finds themselves at the present, one on either side of the fence as it were, illustrates the dilemma that many of China's contemporary artists wrestle with: to stay with what is familiar and gamble with the dramatic changes [that] have overtaken since the late 1980s, or to leave and grapple with the opportunities that may be afforded elsewhere. Ye Yongqing remained in China as a professor at the Academy in Sichuan , pursuing his own art and achieving a respectable degree of success and influence within the country as an artist who evolved a visual language that is immediately identifiable as his own. Xu Zhongmin went abroad, spending time in Europe before settling in England in 1992. Of outstanding talent as a printmaker in the field of woodcuts, he was embraced by exhibitors and public alike, receiving several major awards for his work, the latest of which is the Guinness Prize for Best First-time Exhibitor at the year's Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy . Like Ye Yongqing, since their yearsa at art school, influences of the modern age, different living environments and experiences have inspired Xu's great personal growth, and the move away from traditional approaches. As a Chinese living abroad, certain cultural expectations have kept Xu pursuing the form of woodcuts for which he has such a natural talent, whilst the art environment in Europe has provided him with opportunities to explore video and installation work which he has subsequently developed in parallel with his dark monochrome prints. With such a wealth of young artists in Britain , Xu struggles not only with the making of art, but is prompted to address questions of cultural identity. In the relatively free and creative atmosphere of Sichuan , Ye Yongqing could work steadily on his art, reflecting his own cultural environment, but trapped in a narrow ideology. Here, at least, his identity has never been in doubt. This contrast was the subject of the ‘dialogue' in the exhibition. The work presented in the show brought together Xu's panel woodcuts of various scale, and examples from Ye's poster series on mounted paper and delicate silk panels hand-sewn by the artist, which incorporate symbols and signs of propaganda with a doodling approach to expressing thought process and emotions. During the opening, Xu used the second-floor space for his performance piece The Happiest Day which incorporated film and video sequences. Whilst highlighting the divergence in his art away from Chinese tradition, his video work, at least the mood that all his pieces exude and the structural metaphors they contain, still contain a definite connection to the forms and textures in the woodcuts. From a distance the woodcuts suggest the optical blur produced by the weave and dye method of Indonesian ikat fabric. Closer, the intricate patterns of the woodcuts form claustrophobic networks that allude to dense living in cluttered urban environments. They are very dense and full of stop-go points of transition, in a deliberate maze of complex structures. Similar motifs of affirmation and negation can be found in Ye's larger panels with all the noughts and crosses of political yeses and noes, which he brings together in a looser, more expressive fashion. His small pieces have a more folkloric feel, where the colors are sweeter and the impact less ominous. Hung opposite each other, the works engaged in a harmonious discourse, suggesting that despite the physical distance, these artists remain closely in touch.
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6. Xu Zhongming at 3rd Seville Biennale (2008-2009) Xu Zhongmin has been invited to participate in BIACS 3 – the third edition of the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, Spain: The third edition of the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville will gather more than 150 artists from all over the world in Sevilla, Cordoba and Granada . BIACS 3, to be held from 2 October 2008 to 11 January 2009 , will adopt the title YOUniverse — referring to the interactivity of each individual with the universe. [curated by Peter Weibel] Exhibition announcement – from a FlashArt report.
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