Xiaoyu Cheng | Post-Cultural Revolution China and Rationalist Painting

Xiaoyu Cheng is a Chinese artist currently based in Toronto, Canada. He is an acrylic painter whose style is characterized by the use of surrealism to express deeper philosophical ideas. He is best known for his contributions to the rationalist art movement.

“Rationalist Painting” is a style that first began to appear in artwork in the ‘85 New Wave in China. The style was born from a reactionary movement that criticized the excessively emotional artwork  of the post-Cultural Revolution period. Instead, rationalist artwork centered rational  reflection upon historical and cultural events. At the time, Cheng wrote several articles  discussing the concept, and was active in the rationalist circles.

The style is characterized by several prevalent symbols. One that Cheng often employs is the featureless , genderless figure that serves as a relatable everyman. Another is the lack of concrete setting, which directly opposed the tangible scened featured in post-Cultural Revolution  art. To express the abstract, philosophical questions tackled by rationalists, they often borrowed symbols from Enlightenment, the 17th century European intellectual  movement, including apples, books, and glasses of water.

Cultural influences played a major role in the birth of rationalism. A significant example of this is the Cultural  Fever, a movement in the 80’s that was heavily influenced by Western modernism,  including surrealism, futurism, and Dadaism. However, being wholly trained in realism,  when Chinese artists applied these ideas in their own work, a whole new style was  developed. Cheng called this style that blended realism and philosophical thought  “China’s first avant-garde art movement”.

Impressionism seems to have had a more significant influence on Cheng’s work. His thick, expressive brushwork and abstraction of scenes are far more akin to the works of impressionists like Monet or Pissarro  than to those of surrealists like Dali or Ernst. This stylization was in stark contrast to the socialist realism that most Chinese artists had studied at the time.

白日 I Acrylic on canvas 24 in × 36 in

Sheep are a symbol favoured by Cheng in  particular, as he finds meaning through  exploration of their relationship with  humanity. In 牧人离去, which literally  translates to “the Shepherd's Leaving”,  Cheng calls back to a traditional use of  sheep as a metaphor in art history: a representation of human distraction. The archetype of the distracted shepherd can be found in Holman Hunt’s 1851 work, The Hireling Shepherd.                       

牧人离去 When the Shepherd is Gone Acrylic on canvas 36 in × 48 in

View more of Xiaoyu Cheng's work at ymartgallery.ca!