Mocube is honored to present Jiangnan: Xu Junxuan , a solo exhibition by late artist Xu Junxuan. The exhibition will remain on view through September 6, 2026.

Beijing in the height of summer and Jiangnan in the fading days of spring belong to entirely different seasons. To bring Xu Junxuan’s Jiangnan to Beijing is, in itself, a crossing of time and space. Having devoted his life to painting Jiangnan, Xu’s quietly enduring modernist lineage becomes all the more visible through this displacement.

Born in Shanghai in 1934, Xu Junxuan absorbed both the Eastern European modernism taught by his Romanian mentor Eugen Popa and the distinctly Chinese modernist tradition represented by Lin Fengmian, Guan Liang, and Ni Yide. He transformed these influences into a path uniquely his own—a subtle yet persistent undercurrent of modernity in Chinese oil painting that, for a time, remained largely overlooked.

Xu graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1960 and completed Eugen Popa’s Oil Painting Research Class in 1962. Within the history of twentieth-century Chinese oil painting, this résumé points to the productive tension between Popa’s teaching and that of Konstantin Maksimov. Both artists, invited from socialist countries to train Chinese painters, established influential oil painting programs. Maksimov’s approach followed the Soviet academic tradition, emphasizing tonal modeling, light and shadow, and the realist legacy of the Peredvizhniki, a path that later became the dominant orthodoxy. Popa, by contrast, introduced an Eastern European system that emphasized structure, analysis, and pictorial construction, bringing it closer to the formal concerns of European modernism. Xu Junxuan was both a beneficiary of Popa’s methodology and a leading theorist of non-Soviet oil painting in China. He later devoted substantial research to artists such as Guan Liang, Ni Yide, Lin Dachuan, and Hu Shanyu, producing an extensive body of critical writing that clearly traced this alternative lineage.The avant-garde movement that emerged at the Zhejiang Academy during the 1980s largely began with precisely this method of rational formal analysis before expanding into broader artistic experimentation and critical inquiry. In other words, one of the hidden roots of the ‘85 New Wave in Hangzhou can be found in the painters trained by Popa who remained at the academy as teachers. Xu joined the Oil Painting Department as a faculty member in 1962, and through his teaching this lineage extended to later generations of artists, including Liang Quan, Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, and Wang Guangyi. In November 1985, Xu enthusiastically published the essay Breaking Through the Ground: In Praise of the ’85 New Space Exhibition, publicly voicing his support for his students’ experimental practices.

Xu Junxuan’s Jiangnan is more than a nostalgic homeland of rivers and villages. Jiangnan became the subject through which he pursued formal experimentation. Rather than relying on the Western tradition of painting directly from observation, he organized his compositions according to the multiple viewpoints of traditional Chinese spatial representation. His paintings create a visual ambiguity: simultaneously flat and spatial, their foreground and background relationships deliberately unstable, recalling the pictorial strategies of Paul Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard, where perspective is allowed to undermine itself. Before beginning a painting, Xu produced numerous compositional and colour studies in sketchbooks, selecting and refining the strongest solutions instead of painting directly from life. This working method itself reflects a process of rational analysis—an embodiment of the modernist impulse to liberate painting from narrative.

Xu Junxuan passed away in 2020. Six years later, his Jiangnan arrives in Beijing in a solo exhibition. His restrained, introspective, and deeply considerate form of modernism—one that seemed almost afraid of imposing itself upon others—reveals a quiet yet inexhaustible force. The modernity of Chinese oil painting cannot be understood solely through narratives of radical rupture. Xu represents another possibility: one that retreats into the moonlit evenings of Jiangnan rather than proclaiming itself. Throughout his life, he was never absolute—not absolutely Soviet, not absolutely European, nor absolutely committed to a nationalist aesthetic. His modernity emerged through hesitation, and it is precisely this hesitation that allows it to endure with such quiet persistence.

Text by Dai Zhuoqun