Shen Xiaotong
Overview
"The world is a flower of the mind. The fruit of this flower is not any concept of the being, but the vanishment of all boundaries between all things, actions, and experiences."
Shen Xiaotong was born in Sichuan Province in China, and graduated from the Department of Printmaking, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1989. The artist explores the art of portrait, still life and landscape with the use of a limited palette of colors, often even only a single color.
Shen Xiaotong, who has witnessed the evolution of contemporary Chinese art over the last decades and the impact of Western trends and concepts in art, has firmly embraced the observation and expression of the world around him through his painting. His artistic practice distances itself from cultural rebellion and focuses on the human being as an individual, and on the space around him. Portraits of childhood friends and relatives, flowers, bamboo, and enigmatic mountains are essential subjects in the artist's work. As Xu Sheng accurately manifested: “Shen’s paintings remind us of the fact that there is no painting, there is no image, and there is no language. There are but strokes of paint left on the canvas. These strokes are not a signifier of the relation between the painter and his works, because artworks are conceptual and abstract as well.”
Shen Xiaotong is one of the neo-expressionists artists influenced by senior Southwestern artists, such as Zhang Xiao-Gang and Zhou Chun-Ya. The artist has participated in some of the most significant Chinese contemporary art exhibitions like the China Avant-Garde exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in 1989 and New Art from China: Post-1989 exhibition in Hong Kong. He held his first solo exhibition in Beijing in 1994 and more recently in 2022, the Long Museum in Shanghai honored him with the retrospective “Shen Xiaotong´s painting” solo exhibition, covering the artist’s work during the last decade.
Works
Installation shots
Exhibitions
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