Q: Mr Xu, can you talk about what impressive things have you experienced in your growth? What influence have them brought to your creation?

　　I was born in Wuxi, an ancient city to the south of the Yangtze River. Because my parents worked in other places, I spent most of my childhood with my grandparents. At that time, Wuxi was a beautiful place. The city was made up by folk houses with white walls and black tiles in the watery town. Along the waterway, the houses had the special characteristic of street-front-and-river-behind as well as stilted buildings dotted among them. It was next to the Taihu Lake with Xishan Mountain on the west.

　　However, I didn't know then that Wuxi was a place which had deepest origin with painting art. In history, there were great artists such as Gu Kaizhi in the Eastern Jin Dynasty and Ni Zan in the Yuan Dynasty. In modern times, there were Xu Beihong and Wu Guanzhong, who were the key people who influenced China's art development.

　　I had lived in Wuxi until I was 12 years old, and there seemed to have fated relations between me and painting since childhood. In memory, I had been growing up with a pen in my hand, drawing on the paper. When the other children run and played on the outside, I was often immersed in my painting, painted on paper again and again. The obsession of drawing came from nature, and the expression was far better than the language and words. On the other hand, I was edified by my family. Both of my parents majored in art and graduated from Nanjing Normal College in 1960. Their teachers were professors such as Fu Baoshi, Chen Zhifo, Qin Xuanfu, and Lv Sibai during their study. From my kindergarten time, when the teacher asked me what I wanted to do after growing up, my answer was always the same: "To be a painter". This ideality has never changed. I have never thought about doing other things in these years, and it seems that this is the only thing I can do.

　　The regions to the south of the Yangtze River, has been the most profound cultural heritage in China since ancient times. It's a poetic place where art works grow. In the 1970s, every family in Wuxi had a wired radio, which was a square wooden box hanging on the wall. There was a long switching line under it, and it would be turned on when you pull it. There was a very long period of time during which the finishing music of the broadcast was all ended with the erhu solo The Moon Over a Fountain every night, which was remote and desolate, making people lost in it quietly. I was about eight or nine, and I often sat in the back room, and then went upstairs to go to bed after listening to the music. Till now, the melody would still echo every now and then. Local conditions and customs of those days would clearly emerge in mind with the music, warm light of bulb in kitchen, fragrance in the air, grey tone of rendered walls on both sides of the lanes, married women who did laundry and washed vegetable on the steps by the canal, and boats traveling on the canal, etc. I think these childhood memories will be hidden in my later creation, and become a kind of tone of the picture. The influence of traditional culture is subtle, and it is deep down in the marrow.

　　Q: Can you simply talk about the initial creating motive of these works?

　　This catalog of painting seems to be a brief summary, which is the arrangement of my works of more than 10 years, although works in the catalog are the works in the recent years.

　　This style of creation started from 2000, with two main starting points: the first one was to confirm my own expression way of painting. And the second one was to approach the oriental tradition in my own way. So the style has changed from the previous expressionistic painting style to a more graphic and decorative one, a representational form much like the relief sculpture, since representational form meets my most authentic feeling.

　　Q：We can often see figures of shell, and fish, etc. in your works, do they mean something special to you?

　　I try to reduce elements in my picture, so it can make the surface of the painting purer. Therefore, the images of the works which often bear a particular idea will be preserved. Shell is my favorite kind of presentation elements, modeling beautiful and unique, they are abandoned residence, the previous home. Shell's surface stripes and its inner hole bring me the boundless imaginations of the sea. Fish specimen is embodied with another meaning, which was a beautiful creature roaming in the deep sea. However, as for the general appearance of a picture, the specimen set up in the wind was generated to convey a metaphor meaning the passing away of life. And there were also lizards with eyes wide open. They represented the primitive and savage habitual nature and the strength. But they left the forest habitat, and were demonstrated in the arena of human. Therefore, behind these images pinned my thought of the ocean, which was the mother of life, as well as of life phenomenon of human, and also embodied an "in decapitated" philosophical proposition at the same time.

　　Q: It seems that characters in your works all have very strong emotions. Have you endowed them with your own emotions in creating?

　　Characters in my paintings would have a kind of mood, which is not acquired by the characters' facial expressions. On the contrary, characters in the paintings all have very calm expressions. I express moods by means of the body language of figures, the structure of pictures and colors, which will be more implicit, more profound and more powerful. My friends often say that the figures in paintings are all like me more or less and it could be possible. Because figures in paintings are all the carriers of my inner thoughts, which are all the externalization of my mental imagery.

　　Q: Could you simply talk about your understanding of the exhibition theme this time--"texture of mental imagery"?

　　"Texture of mental imagery" from "texture of mental imagery" means paying attention to images in the mind when "enjoying the natural scenery with serenity in mind"; and "texture" can show one's artistic creating ways.

　　Mental imagery is in terms of the content of my paintings. From the category of Oriental art, mental imagery is relative to the image. All the time, image paintings will always be talked about when discussing Chinese painting art. Freehand brush work and literati painting are mainly included, in which elegance and pithiness are stressed. Now when we are looking at Chinese traditional paintings, we study more from the aspect of image paintings. But I believe there exists another venation in Chinese traditional paintings, which I name the mental imagery painting. This tradition can date back to the Northern Song Dynasty or even earlier. Taking the landscape paintings of the Northern Song Dynasty as an example, the paintings such as "the Journey in Xi Mountain" by Fan Kuan or "the Early Spring" by Guo Xi are greatly different from the later landscape paintings. Their works seem very realistic and figurative but that was not the case. Some delicated mountain peak or landscape in the painting does not exist in reality, but is the reflection of their minds. Although what the picture presents seems very figurative, even with authenticity beyond the reality, that is a mental imagery landscape.

　　Just like my paintings now, I am seeking for the painting expression of mental imagery. The key points of works do not lie in the apparent concretization and realism, for I am merely expressing my inner thoughts with the images in the picture.

　　Viewing from the category of world art, there are essential differences between mental imagery paintings and western representational paintings. As previously mentioned, mental imagery paintings seem to be very representational from their appearances, but they are not obtained through sketch or portrayal of reality. They are the views created by the painter when the outside world is cast on his mind and merges with his subjective ideas. They are the appreciation and performance of the painters' heart images, which are built on the basis of their ideas and experience. The view is inward, a kind of introspecting, cast on the mind. The characteristics of Oriental art lie in this way of viewing the world. But the concretization in the west is a painter's observation and description of the objective external world, and a kind of rational reproduction.

　　With regards to the representation of this kind of mental imagery, I have used an ingenious painting method. I use oil painting and comprehensive materials that are different from the expressing method of traditional western oil paintings and the rice paper or ink of ink wash paintings. It can create a gorgeous colour, with overlapped and blended color points and pieces, presenting an extremely profuse picture effect and texture through layers of accumulation on the textured picture. The sparseness and denseness of accumulation, the strongness or ambiguity of colours, the thickness and thinness, the abundancy or purity, all will vary according to the transfer of mind while painting. Therefore, the seemingly irregular color spots are actually the accumulation of emotions and thoughts just as the condensation of the mental imagery. Because what is formed are mottled color points which give people the feeling of smudging when they are seen afar. They are like cliff paintings and the wrinkle method and layers of halftones in Chinese ink landscape paintings.

　　This kind of points are actually very close to what I feel about the nature. For nature, my first feeling is the dense jungle, a place full of moss and weed, some unknown tiny buds coming out of the earth, clusters of plants growing all around. This kind of scene is the embodiment of the natural life. Including those distant mountains, it would be inappropriate to my feelings if I just use colors, the light and shadow, as well as color lumps to express them. Because in fact there are many plants in the mountain with layers of trees. No matter it's dot or line, it is an expression which is very close to nature and is appropriate to the subject to be expressed. Thus, this technique of point layer by layer has also been combined with my feeling for the natural life.