Xue Feng is far more interested in the printed material than in the landscape.

Before Xue Feng’s painting style had fully formed, two events had a major influence on him, and became creative resources. The first took place in 1997, the year Xue Feng graduated from college. He accepted a job painting 20 copies of Isaac Levitan’s famous work By the Whirlpool. He was not interested in the beautiful painting, the moving story, or the summer dusk; what interested him was why he achieved a different effect with every one of the 20 copies of the painting. Were these subtle differences caused by variations in the colors he mixed, the brushwork, or his mood? These doubts, like the ripples in the whirlpool in the painting, lingered for quite a while without dispersing. Second, Xue had, by chance, collected many miniature images of the Huangshan Welcoming Pine and various printed versions; the same landscape and the same tree appeared differently because of different cropping, color mixing, and printing equipment. Some were cooler, and others were warmer; some were darker, and others were brighter. Xue came to love and habitually collect the same object, similar to an encyclopedia, archive, or comparative anthropological and iconological study. He collected multiple versions of the same pictures, miniature images of West Lake landscapes from several periods, and different editions of the same catalogues. Without access to the original work, many misunderstandings can be caused by printing and technology, and sometimes that printed material or screen actually becomes “true.”

Gallery address: 10/F, H Queen's, Central