July 2026
Through the ancient, into the present — Xiaochuan Small Works Exhibition
This exhibition marks artist Xiaochuan’s first condensed reflection on his first year of artistic practice in Tokyo.
Through fragmented ancient books, calligraphy, oil paint, and pastel, the works move between classical imagery and contemporary experience, constructing a pictorial world that is at once poetic and fractured.
Curator Wang Chunchen writes:
To read the ancient is to examine; to embrace the present is to test the breadth of one’s spirit.
— Wang Chunchen
In Ancients / Song of the Donkey I, Xiaochuan tears apart donkey imagery from ancient books and reconstructs them on wooden panels, allowing splashed pigments and vivid blocks of color to flow like streams of consciousness.
Deconstruction? Satire? Or an absurd allegory of our present condition?
The donkey’s monologue may, in fact, be our own.
In the press
Read the full article — iFeng (Phoenix Net)