Platform China Contemporary Art Institute will open artist Xu Jin's solo exhibition "Strolling Pass Another Paradise" on February 26. The works in the exhibition span more than ten years, and nearly a hundred paintings will be presented. They are the artist's travel sketches beyond the imaginary space, and also his life experience under the tide of the times.

In the history of avant-garde art in China, there are a number of artists who went abroad in the 1980s and still live in a foreign country today. Recent years, as one of the components of the internationalization of Chinese contemporary art evolution, their experience and practice gradually began to receive attention and discussion from art academia. Xu Jin is a typical case.

Most works in this exhibition are his creations and sketches during the COVID-pandemic. These works have no clear theme or goal, most were inspired from sketching or temporary imagination and fiction. Character, space, and time—though highly uncertain, we can still see the level of painter's fascination with narration through the random combination of these basic elements. Figure becomes space, space becomes animal, and also bestow vitality to the symbol of time. Different from traditional religious narration, and also distinguished from the realistic narration that served to criticism, his works have no intention of constructing a utopian narration that leading to the future. At here, the narration has lost its intrinsic truth element, and those paintings are accidental, uncertain, even alterable. All we can feel is fear, anxiety, absurdity, anger…… and, the willpower to resist nihility.