ABOUT ARTIST

„Emptiness also plays a major role in my pictures. There is often an empty space in the center. Distance and emptiness are important for Chinese landscape painting. Water and air are not traditionally painted here, the viewer has to imagine them. That creates vastness.“

Xianwei Zhu is a traveller between worlds, between Asia and Europe, Germany and China. In his painting, Xianwei brings the two traditions together, often straddling the border between figuration and abstraction. He is just as familiar with Chinese ink painting as he is with the expressive colouring of contemporary European painting; he knows the wisdom of Tao Tse King as well as the writings of the German thinker Martin Heidegger.