Xue Feng Solo Exhibition “Extended Landscape”

Xue Feng Solo Exhibition "Extended Landscape"

Opening: 15th September, 2011; 16:00 - 19:00

Exhibition dates: 15th September - 16th October, 2011

Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Sunday, from 12:00 - 19:00 

Address: 798 Art District, Boers-Li Gallery

The Boers-Li Gallery is pleased to host "Extended Landscape", a solo exhibition by the artist Xue Feng, in Gallery II from 15th September - 16th October, 2011.

"Extended Landscape" includes the artist's paintings from over the past three years, and also reflects the artist's recent reflections on the interrelation of images, cultural psychology and vision in landscapes. Perhaps the earliest motif in Xue Feng's paintings originates in the bushes and dead branches that stretch continuously over long distances and throughout the whole year in Hangzhou (the city where he lives). These plants dividing the traffic flow and delineating private spaces are only part of the artist's memory, and the earliest theme in his works. Xue Feng's emphasis is not on expressing the objective existence of those plants and landscapes, but in treating landscape as rhetoric of psychological and personal experience, an attempt to show the interrelation in a given landscape or even between different landscapes.

In the series "Wrong Version", Xue Feng starts flattening his botanic landscapes, and relating them to images used in wallpaper. Using an exquisitely complex handiwork, the artist completes the printed "Wrong Version" in passionate brushwork, what has been eliminated in these patterns are those vague and mysterious social scenes. In the series "Flashback", the landscape of plants begins to reveal a dualism between the true landscape and the wallpaper. Whether it is everyday items spread on a nearby floor, or a building in a foreign country spread over the wall, they continuously hint that these paintings are a combination of gaze and deep contemplation, they refract the artist's reflections and concern for psychological contact: a bag of laundry detergent and a botanical landscape, or the plants of our motherland and a foreign castle––which is nearer to our psyche? Thus, at the same time that these works attract us with the unique richness of the visual experience, these landscapes extend continuously into our cultural psychology, they are a up-close and distant "flashback" on the artist's individual cultural identity, one possessing a unique comprehensivity.

Xue Feng was born in 1973 Ninghai, Zhejiang, and currently lives and works in Hangzhou. He graduated in 1997 from the oil painting department at the China Academy of Arts, and studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art from 2001 - 2003. He began teaching at the China Academy of Visual Arts in the year 2003