In the history of painting as well as literature we find nomadic souls: we know them as artists-travellers or variously as travellers-artists. Let’s imagine the first to travel through territories and plough rivers to find new depths of inspiration, where art is the ultimate goal; the seconds rather love the journey itself; therefore the journey represents the goal, destined then to
become the object of painting. Sometimes the difference is labile. Of course in the Chinese artist’s research Xunmu Wu, the journey became the very manifestation of his being a painter.
Behind Wu is a long tradition: in ancient times we traveled along the religious paths, in pilgrimages to the tops of the sacred mountains; subsequently moved by the anxiety of knowledge. The China was presented as an object to contemplate. The goal of the journey was to reach summit, from which the traveller could be moved by the power of the wind, the colors of the clouds, for the beauty of a sunrise. Faced with the boundless nature, personal misfortunes could be forgotten and the vastness of the universe fully appreciated and painted. In the travel literature were born admirable examples. I think of Xu Xiake, at the time of the dynasty Ming: unlike other great travelers, warlords, explorers or merchants, he represented the figure of the pure traveler - "to wander for a thousand leagues", "not to reach destination" -, without any purpose but the journey to tell.
These are the precedents for an artist such as Xunmu Wu, born in Shanghai in 1947, who, after decades of extreme itineraries in the heart of China, has chosen to represent nature in its
more savage aspects, in the footsteps of ancestral traditions, as interpreted by still minority witnesses of an endangered cultural heritage. Thus, thirty, he lived in the Gobi desert and inland Tianshan Mountains for seventeen years. Valleys and deserts crossed by storms of wind and sand, deep gorges set among the mountains, the starry sky of shepherds - Starry sky of sheperds, this is the title of one of its most recent exhibitions -, joys and hardships in the wildest nature have merged into his artist mind. In the late 80s, Xunmu Wu departs for a six-year expedition, covering remote mountainous areas of the plateau of Yunnan-Guizhou to study the traditions of surviving ethnic cultures. After decades of wandering, the perception of Xunmu Wu’s life eventually comes to move into paintings and inks on canvases or thin slabs of blue slate or on rice paper. Powerful images emerge, which have an ancestral breath and at the same time the perception of a universal epic.
His creative adventure dates back to the 1990s, at a time in history Chinese where attention is rekindled towards ethnic minorities who, in the most remote places of the Country, they had preserved original customs, values, artistic expressions. It was necessary to recover ancient concepts, in a purely aesthetic sense: and behold gao (the elevation), yi (the refreshment), qing (the purity), qi (breath), qu (taste), gu (detachment), ji (hermitage), ya (refinement), as an aesthetic and spiritual condition. It was born around the so-called New Literati Painting the recovery of ancient traditions expressed modernly, through the knowledge of Western neo-avant-garde painting. The ancient identity becomes virtuous motor for the new one.
After exhibiting the results of such research in various exhibitions in the Shanghai district and elsewhere in China, since 2021 Xunmu Wu faces the European scene through the fervent activity of promotion of the MA-EC Gallery. After attending the Present Art Festival in Desio, here it is winner of the Fiorino d’argento at the Florence Prize of 2022, then at the Italian Institute of Culture of Brussels, in the same 2022, then at the Salon des Indépendants at the Grand Palais Éphémère of Paris in 2023; until the most recent solo exhibition, Starry sky of shepherds, staged in
Giuseppe Scalvini Museum in Desio, in collaboration with MA-EC Gallery.
Naturally behind all these activities is the support of his patron Jiebao Liao, Shanghai entrepreneur and his most important and assiduous collector, with whom Xunmu Wu has a relationship that since their first meeting has represented a point of constant reference precisely for the attraction that Jiebao Liao has always had for art and painting.
Through a complex and material abstract painting, of informal inspiration, they are evoked heaven and land, legends and apocalyptic phantasmagoria. The instinctive gesture will fade in the flow of time of creation and materializes in elaborate layers of different thickness, which is overlap, eliminate, crowd each other, until free in a line, a lump of color, a formal intuition that rises. Dynamically appear zones of different density, rhythm, sound, as in a musical score that seems dictated by the urgency of instinct, but that well little gives to improvisation. Thanks to the use of color and brushstrokes, the artist gets so a multidimensional effect: on the background cold colors that form a contrast with yellow bright, red and white, and give the work a sense of movement and tension.
Inks on paper are different: in the foreground stand mysterious characters, equipped with long and threatening clutches, while they engage a furious band, with their black silhouettes against the background of apocalyptic scenarios, represented by vortices of gray diluted that let imagine valleys and deserts swept by storms of raging winds. The description comes to mind that Marco Polo, crossing the Gobi desert, transcribes in Il Milione, the extraordinary report of the travels in the Far East that the merchant drew up in the distant thirteenth century. The Venetian perceives the the presence of the spirits that hover in those extreme lands, and call upon the name of the wayfarers, to confuse and lose them, moving away from the main road: "The desert is all mountains and sand and valleys, and there is nothing to eat [...] when man rides at night for the the desert, this happens to him: that if someone remains before to sleep or for anything else, when he wants then go to reach the companions [...] ode speak spirits in the air, and is disviated sometimes so that it is never found; and many are already lost".
Ancient legends of those extreme lands materialize therefore in the papers of Xunmu Wu, mingling with the panic contemplation of nature. Deserts and strongly evocative visions, which
suggest immense spaces, solitude, nakedness and distance, but also that remote inner space that no telescope can reach, in its unfathomable and very private mysteries.
Claudio Rocca
Director of the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence( 2017-2023)
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