Su Xiaobai: Blue
Su Xiaobai: Blue
Exhibition Dates│ 12.17.2022–02.18.2023
Venue │ Tina Keng Gallery (3F, No. 15, Ln. 548, Ruiguang Rd., Neihu Dist., Taipei, Taiwan 114)
As 2022 draws to a close, Su Xiaobai’s blue palette comes to mind amidst the turmoil of the world. Out of several conversations with the artist emerged an idea of organizing a blue monochrome exhibition at Tina Keng Gallery, titled Su Xiaobai: Blue. It is not because Su prefers these blue representations of varying shades and sizes, but because he thought it would be interesting to observe a single color at a time.
The cover of Ulysses, a novel by modernist author James Joyce published in 1922, is a light shade of blue. This first edition of Ulysses enthralled Su and his old friend when they chanced upon it in Paris. How to re-create this shade of blue has since haunted Su’s practice. But how to paint a blue that carries the warmth of a body remains elusive.
These works of lacquer — each a nuanced tint of blue — coalesce into a palimpsest of layered poetry and chiseled time.
This exhibition has no official opening, but is accompanied by “What the Loved Ones See,” a text penned by Su’s family members, allowing the viewer a glimpse of the albeit reclusive artist. The exhibition opens on December 17, 2022, and closes on February 18, 2023.
What the Loved Ones See
The blue Su Xiaobai paints does not really count as painting.
We came out of the Boesner art supplies store, heavy bags loaded with bottles of pigments. More than half of the store shelves were cleared out. “The British brand I picked this time is a bit pricey,” he said with an apologetic smile as we paid. I actually don’t believe that a brand more expensive than Sennelier will help make better paintings. Somehow he read my mind, pressed my hand and said in earnest, “This time I won’t make paintings. I’ll paint the color spectrum.”
There is a term in his notebook: Ulysses blue. I don’t know where he came across this term, quietly written in a tiny notebook left by Bailing. There is no such a thing as Ulysses blue in the color spectrum.
Such blue exists not in the color spectrum, but in a book published in 1922, titled Ulysses: the blue of its cover. Ever since we and our friend Lao Kong chanced upon the first edition of the book at Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 2022, Xiaobai has nicknamed this indescribable blue as Ulysses blue. And he has not stopped trying to re-create this shade of blue. Several times when he got back from the studio, the only words he uttered were: “Today I just painted blue.”
The cover of Ulysses is actually a pastel shade of Greek blue. Standing on Platform 1 at the Gare d’Orsay in Paris, Sylvia Beach — the owner of Shakespeare and Company — awaited the arrival of a steam train from Dijon. Two copies of the book fresh from the printing factory, permeated with the smell of ink, were on their way as a birthday gift to the destitute author James Joyce on his birthday, February 2, 1922. Revealed from inside the delivery person’s coat, the copies were stuffed into Beach’s hands, still warmed by the body that had carried them all along.
No one could paint a shade of blue that carries the warmth of a body.
When it comes to blue, I’m always reminded of how Xiaobai was lost in thought after he’d seen the blue in frescoes:
The Annunciation by Fra Angelico at the San Marco Museum in Florence, Italy.
The mural of Feast Outing in the tomb of Xu Xianxiu, Northern Qi dynasty in Taiyuan, Shanxi, China.
The Hall of the Months at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy.
The day he’d seen the frescoes, he paced up and down the stone steps, drenched in sweat, as if he’d just been fished out of the water. The blue he’d painted, ever since that day, had fallen short of his expectations of what blue is or should be. Do you still need to hear the reason why he painted Impression of Florence? The Tina Keng Gallery in Neihu, Taipei, Taiwan has five floors: B1, 1F, 2F, and 4F. There’s 3F, too. But the third floor doesn’t count as part of the gallery’s exhibition space. Not really. That’s why Xiaobai has made the bold move of showing his monochrome paintings on the third floor. This unveiling of his new work is titled Su Xiaobai: Blue.
If there’s a next time of an exhibition like this, it should be titled: Su Xiaobai: White, Su Xiaobai: Gray, or Su Xiaobai: Red, Yellow, and Black… No, none of these sounds right. If there’s a next time, it should be titled “Su Xiaobai: Shuimo.”
— Xiaobai’s family
About the artist
Su Xiaobai
Born in 1949 in Wuhan, China
Lives and works in Shanghai and Düsseldorf
A graduate from the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts in Germany, and a member of the Association of Dusseldorf Artists 1844 (Verein der Düsseldorfer Künstler 1844), Su Xiaobai has developed a visual language rich in personal experience and abstraction under the guidance of Konrad Klapheck, Gerhard Richter, and Markus Lupertz, by breaking away from the skills mastered in Beijing.
Immersion in Western culture and separation from his homeland led Su Xiaobai to rediscover the duality between art and object, and renewed his perspective towards the traditional culture of his ancestry. Su became inspired by lacquer — a thousand-year-old plant material and a symbol of Oriental culture — upon his return to China in 2002. He began experimenting lacquer on linen, bricks, sackcloth, clay, vine, and wood as a substitute for oil on canvas. The artist paints layers of vibrantly colored lacquer in a structural and balanced composition, rendering a three-dimensional momentum. The seemingly arbitrary, yet meticulously deliberate handling of visual forms reveals the artist’s pursuit of aesthetics and his personal sense of reinvention.
Su Xiaobai has exhibited internationally, including Beneath a descending moon, breathing: The Paintings of Su Xiaobai, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2019); And There’s Nothing I Can Do, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe City, Japan (2018);Grand Immensity－The Art of Xiaobai Su, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (2013); The Dynasty of Colours, Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany (2009);Kao Gong Ji — Xiaobai Su Solo Exhibition, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2008); and Intangible Greats, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2007).
