About

Xu Bin (b. 1969, Guang'an, Sichuan) is an independent painter living and working in Shenzhen, China. He graduated from the Fine Arts Department of Southwest Normal University and has worked independently since 2008.

His practice has moved through four phases, each carrying the last forward. It began with landscape — villages, trees and animals built from Impressionist and Post-Impressionist colour, in loose broken strokes and pointillist dots: a painter learning to see. In the second phase the human figure took over, and he exaggerates it deliberately — omitting what is incidental, magnifying what carries the person: a mouth opened in laughter, eyes narrowed to a squint. The third phase built the spaces those figures inhabit: mushrooms, circuits and architectural forms, with small figures moving across them. Its subject was contemporary urban life — the state of people now — and alongside it, history set against the present, in a reverie on Dunhuang and the Yumen Pass, where an ancient frontier meets the texture of data.

In his recent large allegorical paintings these threads come together, and the work takes up the questions pressing on him now: what a human being is still worth in an age of artificial intelligence, how a new life should be received, and birth and death themselves. Hands, doors, chains of zeros and ones, and unfinished bodies carved in the manner of Michelangelo's prisoners carry these questions rather than illustrate them. Where the early work asked what the world looks like, the recent paintings begin from what it feels like to be held so tightly — and from the belief that a life should not be over-handled.

Across all four phases runs a Chinese vantage that is specific rather than decorative — the rural Sichuan of his birth, the long Chinese past that lies beneath the work, and the frontier city of Shenzhen where he lives. It is a local vantage brought to questions that belong to no single place.

His work has been shown in group exhibitions across Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen since 2017.