Su Xiaobai

Published with Su Xiaobai Foundation/Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Chinese painter Su Xiaobai (born 1949) transforms the ancient medium of lacquer into a radiant, sculptural language. Trained in both Beijing and Du?sseldorf, he bridges Chinese literati traditions and postwar European painting. Working with local artisans and salvaged burlap, bamboo mats and ceramic tiles from demolished Qing houses, Su combines hand-ground pigments, mineral powders and shell dust into his “soup.” Layered up to 20 times on engineered wood supports, his lacquer surfaces crack, sink and rise as each stratum dries at its own rhythm, exposing hidden chromatic and tactile depths. This volume presents two decades’ worth of Xiaobai’s paintings as well as two essays, a biography and an interview with the artist by curator Stephen Little. It traces his development as a master of lacquer—from his liberating break with oil paint in 2003 through to the present day.

A comprehensive look at paintings, objects, and installations by one of the most prominent artists on the Chinese contemporary art scene through a rich visual documentation surveying the artist’s oeuvre from 2007 to 2015. One of the most prestigious artists in Chinese contemporary art, Su Xiaobai is among a generation of legendary artists who left China in the 1980s. He adopts lacquer, a medium steeped in Chinese history, as his aesthetic means, and has developed a sensuous yet rigorous art practice that defies classification. He has garnered international fame as his work appears in museum collections in China, Taiwan, Germany, and the U.S. and is exhibited at galleries across the globe from France to China. Driven by Chinese tradition, Xiaobai creates intriguing and magnificent work that speaks a Western language of visual abstraction with the Buddhist mantra “All reality is a phantom, and all phantoms are real” as its core. Luscious and mysterious, his body of work is defiantly sculptural yet exquisitely delivered—a constellation of extraordinary objects.

With a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a position as research professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, Gao Minglu is a renowned critic, curator, and scholar of Chinese contemporary art since the mid-1980s. Benjamin Alexander is a philosopher and art critic.