Painting the year's hidden rhythms

The 72 Pentads of 24 Solar Terms series marks a new chapter of his career, says Wu Weishan, former director of the National Art Museum of China. "His colorful, ever-changing strokes create a spiritual domain in which the virtual and the real are infused … to reveal the rules of nature."

Yu Yang, the exhibition's curator, says Xu's work reflects the fusion of talent, courage and passion found in an artist shaped by both his homeland and by encounters with Western art movements abroad.

Yu, also a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, adds that while Xu creates to bridge Chinese and Western art, his creative journey ultimately returns to the deep roots of his own cultural heritage and philosophy. Whatever medium or method he employs, Yu says, Xu strives to express a poetic and spiritual world beyond words, revealing an intellectual's inner dialogue of self-reflection and cultural consciousness.