Go Xiaobin. Colour Landscapes

About the exhibition

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents Colour Landscapes, a solo exhibition of the Chinese artist Go Xiaobin. This international project features his new works that blend the Chinese tradition and contemporary Russian academic landscape painting.

Go Xiaobin studied both in China and in Russia and has focused in his practice on exploring the technique of the Moscow painting school. The Russian composition patterns and use of colour at first were alien to him, as they treat light and space very differently from the Chinese tradition known for its unique framing and subtle tones. The synthesis of cultures has become a key element of his art with its characteristic bright colours, pasty painting style and sketchiness. The artist's experiments created different trajectories in his landscape paintings. One of them inherits the traditional Chinese composition, but incorporates a different tonal culture, leaning in some cases to minimalism. Xiaobin is in constant creative exchange with academic trainers and artists at Moscow Surikov State Academic Institute of Fine Arts and Stroganov Russian State University of Design and Applied Arts. He has visited the cities of the Golden Ring of Russia to create landscapes from nature.

The exhibition consists of several parts. It features landscapes of Russian cities and Chinese provinces, with oriental compositional techniques completely absent, but colours intensified, as saturated as in Chinese silk: azure, purple, bright red. One of the halls presents floral still lifes made in Xiaobin's own technique, akin to traditional Chinese lacquer painting. Another series of minimalist canvases is inspired by ancient rock carvings on Mount Helan in China. In his art, Xiaobin sought to preserve and enhance the interaction between emptiness and space, characteristic of Chinese petroglyphs. For a deeper insight into Go Xiaobin's work, the artist's palette is presented in one of the halls, which demonstrates his process of searching for the right colour. The exhibition also features the artist's comments on his art and his design project for a subway station in Wuhan (Huashan station).

About the artist

Go Xiaobin was born in 1979 in Luoyang, Henan Province, China. He graduated from the Pedagogical University of Arts in Henan, China (2001) and a master's degree programme from the Moscow Surikov State Academic Institute of Fine Arts (2006), after which he interned at Tahir Salakhov’s workshop. He is currently based in Moscow and Troitsk. Go Xiaobin teaches at the painting department of the Stroganov Russian State University of Design and Applied Arts. Honorary Professor of Xiamen University (2014). Honorary Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Arts (2018). PhD holder in Art History (2018), with the thesis titled The Influence of the 1950s and 1960s Soviet painting on the Development of Chinese Fine Art: Reception and Tradition on the Chinese Art Scene.