Ai Xuan: portrait of the artist
A staunchly realist painter's Tibetan imaginings may seem clear-cut, but there is a hidden layer of paradox and pain, writes Charley Lanyon
Ai Xuan is a realist and proud of it. Even as avant-garde Chinese artists attract ever greater attention - and rake in record prices - Ai has only become more fervent in his devotion to his "old-fashioned" style of painting.
Chatting under the gaze of his paintings of Tibetan peasants, he repeatedly exalts the realist approach - the difficulty of the medium, the skill required - and reacts with confusion towards anything modernist.
I prefer more difficult art – art that requires more skill
The more "real" the painting the better, says Ai, who was in Hong Kong two weeks ago to attend the Fine Art Asia show and the opening of his exhibition "Colours From Ink" at the Kwai Fung Hin gallery.
So it's startling when he gestures to the bright-eyed Tibetan families staring out from the walls and says: "These are all my creations. None of them are real."
This contradiction defines Ai Xuan: an artist whose life has been spent deconstructing reality and using the pieces to create fantasies that have proved popular with the mainland elite. The Sacred Mountain, one of his oils, fetched 20.7 million yuan (HK$26 million) at the Beijing Poly auction in 2010, while at a Sotheby's sale in Hong Kong this year, another work, Longing, went for HK$9.6 million.
His latest Hong Kong exhibition represents a departure: after a lifetime spent working in oils, the show features 30 ink drawings - his first gallery show involving the medium.
As a teenager, Ai, the son of a famous political poet, studied realist painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts at a time when art students in China had limited options.