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Lot Essay
In her Fragrance series, Xu Hualing depicts young women's bodies as a way of presenting female self-awareness in a contemporary context. She has developed her own new line of thought within the Chinese tradition of fine-brush ink painting: her use of the "boneless" technique (color without outlines) weakens both lines and the sense of light and shadow, bringing into her work the washes of color seen in watercolors and presenting her subjects with the vague mistiness of flowers seen through a fog.
Xu Hualing says that "In a view from behind there is always a kind of unseen feeling." In this painting, the facial features that would represent the woman's identity have been omitted. Such a concealment of identity expands the painting's possibilities: she could be anyone, and the artist's portrayal is not intended to reproduce the likeness of another, but instead, to show a concern for the self and a search for the value of the individual's existence. In Xu Hualing's works, traditional aesthetic experience is transformed, conveying an awareness of individual existence, so that the traditional Chinese genre of finely detailed gongbi paintings instead presents us with her present-day search for a humanist spirit.
Xu Hualing says that "In a view from behind there is always a kind of unseen feeling." In this painting, the facial features that would represent the woman's identity have been omitted. Such a concealment of identity expands the painting's possibilities: she could be anyone, and the artist's portrayal is not intended to reproduce the likeness of another, but instead, to show a concern for the self and a search for the value of the individual's existence. In Xu Hualing's works, traditional aesthetic experience is transformed, conveying an awareness of individual existence, so that the traditional Chinese genre of finely detailed gongbi paintings instead presents us with her present-day search for a humanist spirit.