Xue Feng

Boers-Li Gallery, New York, is delighted to present Xue Feng’s debut solo exhibition in the United States. Pictographs will feature the artist’s latest series of paintings. Expanding from his previous exhibition in Beijing from 2018, Tales on Territories, Xue Feng continues to negotiate the ambiguities between the pictorial and the formal, the figurative and the abstract in the context of re-imagining global geopolitics.

Xue Feng’s approach to landscape painting has always been a global one. Throughout his painting practice, the artist has negotiated two contending visual traditions. The first of these traditions is profoundly ingrained in the artist - traditional Chinese literati painting - where the landscape projects the conception of the universe, and ultimately the painter’s position within it; and the other, with Western landscape paintings where the tableau is a site of experience. Straddling both of these traditions, Xue Feng has been asking himself the question, “How should I construct an image of the landscape?” In order to do so, he had to develop a visual linguistic system for the canvas. The contouring of brushstroke, squeegeed color surfaces, and the erosion of paint on canvas found in all three series on view in this exhibitions - Pictographs, Brushstrokes Aura, and Green - are visual devices Xue Feng has developed over the last decade, each derived from the artist’s interpretation of these two painting traditions.

In recent years, relocating his artist’s studio to the Pearl River Delta region, from the inland to a portal city neighboring Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the infinite archipelagoes in Southeast Asia, where the constant shifts in regional and global politics compelled Xue Feng to re-imagine a world of the unknown through painting. Unlike many abstract expressionist artists who aim for a subliminal experience through the landscape, Xue Feng’s approach to artistic expression is concrete, specific, and grounded in personal experience. For Xue, the form is what affords the object shape and structure, and the pictograph is a symbol that belongs to a pictorial system, or the simulacrum of reality.

As the title of this exhibition “Pictographs” suggests, Xue Feng engages the viewer in a game of association - where one’s perception of the symbolic translates into conceptions of the memetic. Through this act of assemblage, Xue Feng's pictographs offer the grounds on which a new world order may be imagined, where not only one would discover one's position, but also one that transcends temporal and geographical confines.

Xue Feng, born in Zhejiang Province, currently lives and works in Shenzhen. He studied oil painting at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. Xue Feng has been the subject of solo exhibitions including, “Tales on Territories”, Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing (2018); “Ultra-Sides”, Gallery Exit, Hong Kong (2017); “The Tranquility Series”, Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing (2016); “Enclosure”, Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing (2013) and “Extended Landscapes”, Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing (2011). His works have been shown in major institutions worldwide, including “Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture”, Hong Kong/Shenzhen (2017); Kunstmuseum Bern, Germany (2016); Sishang Art Museum, Beijing (2015); Long Museum, Shanghai (2014); Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai (2013) among others. Xue Feng’s works are in renowned private and public collections, including the Sigg M+ Collection, The White Rabbit Contemporary Chinese Art Collection, Frank. F. Yang Collection and others.