“The New Spirit in Painting: Moving Beyond - Painting In China, 2013”.

　　Xu Longsen’s art practice leaves no room for accident or ambiguity, yet a sense of space in physical terms can be seen to resonate with meditation, order and purpose. A silence draws the viewer, where layers of grey ink allude to the movements in music and in nature itself. Without obvious borders, the abstracted forms in Xu’s paintings ascend to the mountain peaks, where light bathes the soft visual forms. There, clouds, shadows, aspects of night and day, surprise and reverie, constantly amaze and inspire with a spiritual force. Adapting a classical language, the paintings of Xu are also forceful statements about contemporary society, addressing global issues of great urgency. Responding as well, to superficial notions of the Chinese exotic, Xu Longsen expresses his rejection of the attitudes of artists such as Ai Weiwei who destroy classical artefacts to illustrate political views, and to the vast number of artists in the burgeoning industry in China who are determined to replace old forms for new as a matter of course. The monumental quality of Xu’s landscape painting, its majesty and dynamism calls into question contemporary Chinese culture and in turn questions the nature of contemporary global culture. The Director of the National Art Museum of China, Fan Di’an, states that Xu Longsen's landscapes bring the visual power between softness and strength and a reverence for the universe and the earth. His landscapes have, he observes, inherited the feelings of the Song dynasty for the great mountains and the rivers in landscapes, but in their implied knowledge of technique from different dynasties his landscapes form the essence of the history of Chinese landscape painting.30

　　“Each time I step into Xu Longsen’s vast studio, the first word that comes into my mind is not art, but thought. The gigantic works there transcend many techniques, styles and forms in that they are a holistic overview of Chinese art history. He does not think of the past as opposed to the present. Instead, he enriches the present by embedding the past into it. In the landscape paintings he reinvented, tradition is the basis of innovation. In the paintings, the past and the present interact with each other and grow together, which is rarely seen in China. It requires an artist’s prudence, audacity and profundity.”31

　　Angelo Capassi, the curator of On Top of Two Worlds (2011) believes that Xu Longsen has since 2001, “virtually [initiated] a revolution when he began to concentrate on landscape painting”.32 Although not well known outside of China his landscape painting is characterized by the use of traditional methods of calligraphy - the intricate and subtle technique of brush-and-ink, but on a greatly magnified scale. A work that might historically be viewed closely, in Xu’s hands assumes an architectural scale. He is on one hand reviving the essential aspects of Chinese painting, but far from creating mimesis, his inspirational works challenge the Chinese people’s view of nature, which is in itself has changed dramatically in the past century, and also further in recent years. Against a background of environmentally devastating policies under Mao, and more recently the profligate use of outmoded industrial methods that create severe pollution, the awe-inspiring beauty in Xu Longsen’s work is a stark reminder and indeed a judgement call for a civilization that has the economic power in global terms to wreak havoc and destruction as a consequence of transformational economic policies and development. “The error of contemporary landscape painting lies not only in the decline of painting as an art, but even more in the perishing of the landscape itself, and in the loss of what it means to experience it”.33 In relation to Xu Longsen’s painting, Gao Shiming seeks to clarify Nature:

　　“Nature is not limited to the mountains and waters; nor is it a collection amounting to the whole of creation. Nature is the movement of the cosmos, the genesis of genesis; it is creation and change. Nature has “The Way” within it, and yet there is no way to define it. The process of modelling something after nature must therefore hinge on the whole of creation – what it has come to be, and the way it continues to transform. Inspiration is the basis of the relationship between us.”34

　　BEIJING – CHENGDU – NANJING, APRIL 2012:

　　In April 2012 the first trip to organise the exhibition: Moving Beyondtook place. Photographer Nick Howard from London joined the group and took thousands of photographs of the artists and their studios. In this exhibition and in the publication, which accompanies it, his photographs capture the warmth, the profound seriousness and adventure we experienced, and enhance the reality of the project greatly. Organised primarily by poet Zhao Ye in Beijing, who has been active in the art world since the early 1980s, he has established a fine network: thus enabling for ourselves an intense round of studio visits to many of the best artists in China. We started in Beijing, and nearby villages: Shang Yang (b.1948), Su Xinping (b.1960), Xia Xiaowan (b.1959), Shi Chong (b.1963) Wang Chuan (b.1953) Ye Yongqing (b.1958), Guan Jingjing (b. 1983), Shao Yinong (b. 1961) and He Sen (b.1968). After a press conference at which Shang Yang and Su Xinping spoke in support of Moving Beyond, we flew to Chengdu to meet: He Duoling (b.1948), He Gong (b. 1955) and then to Nanjing: Liu Guofu (b. 1964), and Mao Yan (b. 1968).

　　It was the exceptional quality of the work in terms of the concept and praxis of the individual artist’s language and the wider world that distinguished the experience. Four of the artists we visited are in the first Edinburgh Festival exhibition, which this catalogue accompanies (Liu Guofu, Guan Jingjing, He Gong and Yang Liming) they are joined by Liang Quan, our most senior practitioner, and Wu Jian. A more extensive ensuing exhibition is being planned for Edinburgh in 2014, with a symposium in association with the Royal Scottish Academy. Representing what I have identified as a new spirit in painting- that Xu Longsen so eloquently defined in Rome, and further during a meeting in Beijing in April 2011 at which Xu and Nick Howard entered in to a long discussion concerning historic issues in East/West relations; Xu Longsen recommended to us specifically, The Problem of China by Bertrand Russell, (1922) one of many surprises we experienced on our journey, this longstanding text that has been of immeasurable value.