Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: in the contemporary Chinese artistic landscape, where so many painters exhaust themselves chasing after Western fashions or indulge in superficial traditionalism, Xu Lele stands out as a delightful anomaly. This woman born in Nanjing in 1955 practices an art that reconciles the old and the modern with a mischievous intelligence that would make even the most skillful contortionists in art history envious.
Graduated in 1976 from the Department of Fine Arts at the Nanjing Art Academy, Xu Lele first experienced an unconventional path: after her studies, she chose to go to the countryside to “experience the life of a writer,” before joining the Jiangsu Provincial Painting Academy in 1978, where she specialized in figure painting and studied the work of Chen Laolian, a master of the Ming dynasty. This classical training, far from confining her to imitation, provided her with the technical tools that would later allow her to subvert the codes with consummate mastery.
For Xu Lele belongs to that generation of Chinese artists who have navigated between the pitfalls of traditional pastiche and imported modernity. Representing the “new scholar painting” school, she develops a style that draws from classical Chinese aesthetics while infusing it with irresistible humor and confident modernity. Her characters with large noses, small eyes, and round faces like full moons move within compositions of remarkable technical sophistication, where each line seems drawn to seduce the admirer rather than impress the critic.
The art of distancing: Xu Lele and the legacy of Bertolt Brecht
There is a theatrical dimension in Xu Lele’s work that has not escaped the most perceptive observers. Her characters, with their slightly disrupted expressions and deliberately distorted proportions, irresistibly evoke the figures of Brechtian dramaturgy. Like the German playwright, Xu Lele refuses direct emotional identification and favors a form of distancing that allows the viewer to maintain a critical mind. The beauties of the Tang dynasty she paints are not ideals to be gazed at blissfully, but cultural constructions to be questioned with kindness.
This approach reaches its peak in her works such as “The Twelve Beauties of Jinling” or “Showing a Painting,” where the artist stages the very process of artistic contemplation. Her characters seem aware of being observed, and this awareness generates a subtle irony reminiscent of the alienation techniques dear to Brecht [1]. When Xu Lele paints a lady looking at a painting herself, she creates a mirror game that questions our relationship with classical art and its contemporary reception.
Brecht’s influence on Xu Lele’s artistic conception goes beyond a mere aesthetic parallel. Like the playwright who wanted his audience to leave the theater reflecting rather than crying, Xu Lele conceives her works as spaces for playful reflection on the Chinese cultural heritage. Her “ancients” are not venerable figures frozen in their solemnity, but disguised contemporaries who return to us, with a sly smile, the image of our own illusions about the past. This critical dimension, always tempered by humor, makes her canvases real laboratories for experimenting with codes of representation. The artist thus develops an aesthetics of complicity with the viewer, creating a space of critical freedom within the very Chinese pictorial tradition.
The geometry of dreams: Architecture and construction of the imaginary
Architecture plays a fundamental role in Xu Lele’s pictorial universe, not just as a simple backdrop but as an organizing structure of the imagination. Trained in the tradition of Chinese painting where space does not obey the laws of Western perspective, she develops an architectural conception of composition that evokes classical Chinese gardens with their clever plays of revelation and concealment. Her pavilions, bamboo curtains, and boat canopies do not merely delimit the pictorial space: they create resonance chambers for emotion and contemplation.
This architectural approach to painting finds its roots in the Chinese philosophy of dwelling, where domestic space is never neutral but always carries symbolic meaning. In Xu Lele’s work, the painted architectures function as metaphors of the human soul, with their secret corners and unexpected perspectives. Her characters move in constructed environments that reflect their inner states: melancholic literati are found in pavilions open to infinity, while coquettish beauties shelter behind delicately crafted folding screens.
Xu Lele’s originality lies in her ability to transform these traditional architectural codes into a contemporary plastic language. She borrows from the architecture of Chinese gardens their principle of visual promenade, where each viewing angle reveals a new perspective on the whole. Her compositions work like initiatory journeys where the viewer’s gaze is guided from detail to detail, from surprise to surprise. This mastery of architectural space allows her to create works of remarkable narrative complexity, where several stories can unfold simultaneously in distinct but connected spaces by a rigorous compositional logic. Architecture thus becomes in her work a tool for constructing the pictorial narrative, allowing the temporal richness of the tale or legend to unfold in the two-dimensional space of the canvas.
The irony of time: Between nostalgia and lucidity
What immediately strikes about Xu Lele is her remarkable ability to maintain a delicate balance between affection and critical distance towards the Chinese tradition. Her predecessors are neither saints to be venerated nor outdated figures to be ridiculed, but companions with whom she maintains a friendly and conspiratorial relationship. This attitude, rare in contemporary Chinese art which is often torn between absolute reverence and radical rejection of the past, allows her to develop a plastic language of striking originality.
Xu Lele’s humor is never destructive but always benevolent. When she paints a scholar with impossible proportions contemplating the moon, she does not mock the traditional ideal of the sage withdrawn from the world, but reveals the element of artifice and cultural construction within it. Her distortions, far from being caricatures, function like magnifying glasses that reveal the hidden mechanisms of aesthetic idealization. This lucidity without bitterness makes her works true antidotes to the nostalgic melancholy that often threatens artists faced with the weight of cultural heritage.
Xu Lele’s modernity also manifests in her way of treating pictorial time. Her compositions escape linear chronology to create hybrid space-times where past and present naturally coexist. This fluid temporality, characteristic of traditional Chinese aesthetics, takes on a new dimension under her brush that resonates with contemporary concerns about memory and cultural identity. Her characters seem to inhabit an eternal present that excludes neither memory nor anticipation, creating a poetry of the instant that surpasses Western temporal categories. This mastery of pictorial time makes her works contemplative refuges in a world where generalized acceleration threatens the very possibility of reflection.
Far from theoretical debates on postmodernity or cultural globalization, Xu Lele invents a singular path that reconciles tradition and innovation without sacrifice or compromise. Her art testifies to a cultural maturity that fully embraces the heritage of the past while inventing the forms of its future transmission. This wisdom, found in her statements where she asserts she prefers to be “an interesting small painter rather than a boring great painter,” reveals a deep understanding of what art can be in the contemporary era: no longer a vehicle for absolute truths, but a space for shared play and reflection.
The revolution of detail: Technique and obsession
Xu Lele’s technique is particularly interesting because it reveals a conception of painting that goes against the dominant trends of contemporary art. At a time when speed of execution and immediate impact seem to prevail, she deliberately cultivates slowness and precision, pushing the refinement of detail to limits bordering on obsession. This approach, which she openly claims by stating that “the pursuit of meticulousness is my quest of recent years,” is not a simple virtuoso exercise but a philosophy of art that favors intensity over scope.
This passion for detail finds its roots in her training as a children’s book painter, an activity she practiced intensively before dedicating herself entirely to scholar painting. This experience taught her the importance of visual storytelling and the necessity of capturing attention through the richness of secondary elements. In her current works, this lesson is reflected in a proliferation of decorative motifs of staggering complexity: embroidery, architectural ornaments, textile patterns that transform every square centimeter of the canvas into a territory of visual exploration.
Xu Lele’s obsession with detail is not just a matter of technical prowess but an ethic of creation that places the pleasure of painting at the center of the artistic process. As she explains herself: “Painting stockings, lace, is very delightful!” [2]. This joy of creation, rare in contemporary artistic discourse often dominated by conceptual concerns, reveals an artist who has managed to preserve the innocence of the creative act. This authenticity of pictorial commitment shines through in her works and largely explains their seductive power. The viewer immediately senses that they are dealing with an artist who takes obvious pleasure in practicing her art, and this communicative clarity creates an immediate complicity that transcends cultural and temporal barriers. Perhaps this is the secret of the universality of her art: in a world saturated with messages and intentions, Xu Lele offers the rare experience of art that exists first and foremost for the pleasure it provides to its creator.
The school of sight: Pedagogy of vision
Beyond her artistic production, Xu Lele develops a true pedagogy of sight that shines through in her obsessive practice of cutting out and classifying images. This activity, which she describes enthusiastically in her interviews, reveals an artist who is not content to create but who methodically organizes her relationship with the universal visual heritage. Her more than 130 scrapbooking albums bear witness to an almost encyclopedic approach aimed at mapping all the aesthetic possibilities of Chinese art.
This seemingly anecdotal practice of cutting out actually enlightens Xu Lele’s creative method. By constituting these personal visual archives, she gives herself the means to master the history of Chinese art not as a theoretical corpus but as a repertoire of plastic solutions immediately available. This pragmatic approach to tradition allows her to avoid the traps of sterile erudition to develop a living and creative relationship with the heritage of the past.
The generosity with which Xu Lele shares her discoveries and methods reveals a conception of art as a common good rather than as a private territory. This openness, which appears in her numerous collaborations and in her availability to young artists, makes her a tutelary figure of the contemporary Chinese art scene. Her influence goes far beyond the circle of her direct admirers to irrigate the entire movement for the renewal of traditional Chinese painting. This pedagogical dimension of her work, often overlooked by critics, nevertheless constitutes one of her most lasting contributions to the art of her time.
The art of reconciliation
In the often conflictual landscape of contemporary Chinese art, Xu Lele occupies a unique position that allows her to reconcile seemingly contradictory trends. Her art demonstrates that it is possible to be deeply rooted in tradition without relinquishing innovation, to be critical without being destructive, to be popular without being vulgar. This remarkable synthesis makes her works models of what truly contemporary art could be: neither rushing forward nor stuck in paralyzing nostalgia, but inventing a present that fully embraces its heritage.
Xu Lele’s example shows that the question of Chinese artistic modernity may not be posed in the usual terms of opposition between tradition and innovation. Her career rather suggests the possibility of a middle path that would allow Chinese art to participate in the international dialogue without losing its soul. This lesson, which goes far beyond the Chinese context, resonates with the concerns of all artists confronted with the challenge of cultural globalization.
Xu Lele perhaps offers us the most precious gift: proof that it is still possible, in our era of widespread standardization, to develop an authentically personal artistic language. Her art, which neither imitates nor rejects but transforms and enriches, opens new perspectives on what creation can be in the age of generalized technical reproducibility. This true originality, which is not decreed but earned through work and reflection, makes Xu Lele one of the most precious voices of contemporary art.
- Bertolt Brecht, Writings on Theatre, Paris, L’Arche, 1972.
- Interview with Qian Xiaozhi, “Dialogue Xu Lele: Even if one cannot be a great painter”, 2010.
