Xie Nanxing (b. 1970, Chongqing, China) is a key figure in contemporary painting from China, internationally recognized for challenging painterly conventions through a practice that navigates the unstable boundary between abstraction and figuration.

Over the past three decades, Xie has developed a distinctive practice drawing on both Chinese and Western traditions, extending the formal and psychological dimensions of figurative painting. He first gained international recognition at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), where he showed quasi-photorealist self-portraits and male nudes depicted in wounded, vulnerable states. In the early 2000s, he began working from blurred photographs and mediated source imagery, producing large-scale paintings that moved his practice toward abstraction—three of which were shown at Documenta 12 (2007). Since then, he has expanded his practice to include a broader range of approaches, including a “canvas print” technique, in which he paints onto a secondary canvas so that only the traces seeping through to the underlying surface remain. Rather than constructing fixed images, Xie treats painting as a temporal process—unfolding through fragmentation, rhythmic brushwork, and subtle shifts in form. Across his work, repetition functions not as duplication but as variation, allowing images to hover between recognition and dissolution. His paintings resist stable narrative or symbolic closure, foregrounding the act of seeing itself. For Xie, perception is neither transparent nor neutral but a site of tension, delay, and continual transformation.

Since completing her MFA in Printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (2013), Ju has developed a distinctive method rooted in printmaking techniques. She builds up dense, monochromatic or vividly colored strata of acrylic, which she then slices, tears, or lifts away to expose underlying layers. Through this physical intervention, the pictorial surface becomes a site of excavation, transforming the canvas into a quasi-sculptural field defined by depth, tension, and material presence. Gravity and elasticity play an active role in shaping the works, as draped, folded, or fissured paint creates textures that oscillate between control and coincidence. While her practice firmly excludes representational imagery, Ju’s compositions evoke a dynamic visual and emotional intensity through color, scale, and form. In her Amber series, amorphous, circular shapes emerge in cascades of luminous hues, resembling suspended matter or fermenting energy that spills beyond the picture plane. These radiant, seemingly spontaneous configurations carry an undercurrent of latent force, where vibrant surfaces subtly suggest rupture, pressure, and transformation. Across series such as Untitled, +-, and Pearl, Ju continues to manipulate painted surfaces through incision and layering, producing works that shift between sensuality and restraint, expansion and containment.