北京｜五行生——付晓东个展

Her curatorial and theoretical work in contemporary art is deeply rooted in a reinterpretation and reimagining of orthodox Chinese culture—particularly painting, calligraphy, and landscape art. She adopts the term “post-traditionalism” to describe her approach, in which the knowledge-power structures of morality and politics embedded in traditional culture are suspended. Instead, she integrates insights from natural science and anthropology, reactivating the intuitive vitality and intrinsic truth of the traditional world.

Since Li Xiaoshan’s <My View on Contemporary Chinese Painting>, mainstream discussions on tradition have largely centered on the tension between the ancient and the modern or on questions of national identity. In contrast, Fu Xiaodong revisits the fundamental concepts of traditional Chinese natural aesthetics through the lens of cutting-edge cosmology and natural sciences. By doing so, she seeks a new trajectory for Chinese art—one grounded in natural truth—thereby opening a long-overdue window onto a landscape that classical Chinese art, constrained by dialectical historical logic, was always meant to embrace.

Beyond the cosmology of natural science, Fu Xiaodong also incorporates modern hypnosis practices in psychology and religious anthropology into the realm of contemporary art. The spirituality of classical culture, the remnants of primitive shamanistic rituals, and modern physiological hypnosis techniques are integrated within a shared framework for creative experimentation. When these cross-disciplinary heritages are examined within the same context, their underlying biomechanical consistency becomes intuitively evident.

As Fu sought to synthesize the conclusions of her radical explorations, she realized that none of these interdisciplinary practices had truly departed from the artistic framework of Chinese painting. At the level of brushwork, Chinese painting functions as a visual-tactile hypnotic technique, guiding viewers into a finely tuned state of concentration—an experience that neither machinery nor AI can replicate. At the compositional level, the interplay of blank space and structured density paradoxically reveals the fundamental tension patterns of the world. The “qi of emptiness” is not an absence but a cohesive force, resonating in harmony with human natural perception.

Both Chinese painting and Zen are manifestations of life force—a unity that Dong Qichang once articulated. This force does not manifest as a unilateral exertion, like lifting a weight, but as an organic power that permeates both the inner and outer realms, akin to the dynamic shaping of valleys and mountains. Fu Xiaodong, however, takes this a step further by synthesizing the brush strength of Yan Zhenqing, Lin Haizhong’s transmission of landscape profundities, cutting-edge cosmological theories, modern hypnosis techniques, and religious anthropology. The force that emerges from this synthesis is no longer confined to the static “qi of valleys and mountains” but transforms into a generative, interdependent energy—one that nurtures and propagates across heterogeneous dimensions.

The exhibition, titled “The Five Elements Generate”, returns to the visual-tactile structure of natural imagery. For the first time, we see Chinese painting functioning like a physics laboratory, where different natural materials are transformed through brush and ink, allowing them to spontaneously generate the sensory experience we once called “qi resonance.” The strength of the tension in qi resonance varies between different material combinations, leading to the realization that the so-called metaphysics of mutual generation and restraint, once quantified and qualified through brush and ink, becomes so intuitive.

Fu’s depiction of natural forms is neither a precise, meticulous reproduction like Huang Quan’s <ketches of Rare Birds> nor an impassioned, freehand expression like Xu Wei’s ink-splashed grapes. Instead, she employs the discipline of brush and ink to mimic the visual language of scientific natural history illustrations, constructing a hypnotic-level tactile-visual information flow at the tip of the brush. The result is a trance-like state reminiscent of “dreamcore” aesthetics.

In this new “dreamcore flow” of Chinese painting, the textural qualities of Western surrealist brushstrokes are not merely adopted but transcended. The materiality and brush control unique to Chinese painting refine the “dreamcore sensation”, transforming it from the flickering, fragmented imagery of an old television into an immersive, IMAX-like physical experience. While some Chinese painters have attempted to replicate surrealism through meticulous brushwork, their efforts often veered into decorative illustration. Only now do we realize that the issue was never an inherent limitation of Chinese painting in evoking dreamlike atmospheres, but rather a lack of recognition that the movement of brush and ink itself could function as a powerful hypnotic technique.

Fu’s style of Chinese painting emerges as a gift from the fissures of civilization’s historical tectonics. When landscapes, the Hetu and Luoshu diagrams, and natural history overlap, what unfolds is not merely a Magrittean psychological space but the very essence of Chinese painting’s millennia-long evolution—its capacity to pull the human spirit into the boundless tension of nature.