captured from ocula.com website , Su Xiaobai, Glimmer, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei (8 November-31 January 2025). Courtesy Tina Keng Gallery

In 2025, Su Xiaobai presents a body of lacquer works at Tina Keng Gallery that unfolds with a subdued yet radiant depth. 

Built through accumulated layers, the surfaces emit a quiet luminosity, inviting viewers into a contemplative encounter shaped by time, material, and restraint.

Su deliberately refrains from explaining the exhibition’s title. 

The Chinese expression 幽幽 (yōu yōu) commonly evokes a sense of depth, stillness, or gentle remoteness. 

For the artist, however, it carries no fixed definition. It is simply a phrase that lingered with him—an echo of a feeling that emerged during moments of reading and writing. 

The words were drawn from a small notebook he keeps close at hand, where fragments, quotations, and half-formed thoughts are casually recorded.

 Writing, like painting, is an integral part of his daily rhythm: if painting brings exhilaration, writing offers a quieter space where incomplete ideas can rest without resolution.

Language, in Su’s practice, is not a vehicle for declaration or explanation. It arises intuitively, much like his visual work. 

The pieces in this exhibition, while rooted in lived experience, extend far beyond autobiographical documentation. 

They trace an ongoing dialogue between duration, material presence, and the artist’s own physical and emotional engagement. 

Su Xiaobai
Dim Gleam, 2024
Oil, lacquer, linen, wood
168 × 160 × 19 cm
66 1/4 × 63 × 7 1/2 inches
Courtesy of Tina Keng Gallery

Each work embodies moments of deep immersion followed by release, reflecting a process that is both rigorous and yielding.

Ultimately, these lacquer works stand as testaments to Su Xiaobai’s persistence and sensitivity—poetic manifestations shaped by lacquer, tile, and the memory of his hometown. 

Quiet yet resolute, they resonate with a depth that resists easy articulation, lingering instead as a sustained, contemplative presence.

Su Xiaobai is widely regarded as one of the most singular voices in contemporary Chinese painting. Born in 1949 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, he began his formal art education in 1965 at the Wuhan School of Arts and Crafts. 

Between 1985 and 1987, he studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, before relocating to Germany in 1987 to undertake postgraduate studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He returned to China in 2003 and now lives and works between Shanghai and Düsseldorf. 

Prior to his move to Germany, Su’s practice was largely grounded in social realism.

 Encountering Western avant-garde art firsthand, however, proved transformative.

 Throughout the 1990s, his work gradually shed figurative elements, and after his return to China it increasingly concentrated on the fundamental qualities of color, form, and surface. 

By abandoning recognizable imagery altogether, Su developed a visual language that bridges Western abstraction and Chinese philosophical thought, echoing Buddhist ideas such as the Sutra passage, “Everything is nothing, nothing is everything.” Su Xiaobai’s practice is both sensual and exacting, resisting easy categorization. 

While lacquer—his chosen medium—is deeply rooted in Chinese artistic tradition, he employs it in ways that feel strikingly contemporary.

Su Xiaobai Profundity, 2024 Oil, lacquer, linen, wood 163 x 158 x 14 cm 64 1/4 x 62 1/4 x 5 5/8 inches Tina Keng Gallery

 His works balance physical presence and painterly refinement: at once sculptural and meticulously crafted. 

With finishes that recall shells, gently curved silhouettes, and worn, tactile surfaces, each piece asserts its own material history and autonomy.

 Rather than representing external subjects, Su’s art engages with questions of existence itself, using the language of abstraction to explore philosophical concerns that resonate on a profoundly human and universal level.