Xianwei Zhu's landscape painting forms an interface between the Far Eastern ideas of Zen Buddhism and the Western world of ideas of Romanticism.

A painter who oscillates between East and West, who throws Far Eastern philosophy and ideas into a pot with those of the West, mixes and reinterprets them. A modern Caspar David Friedrich, with roots in Ming painting, seasoned with the world view of a Martin Heidegger. Too much of a good thing? Too much of a "mixed bag" of different eras, spiritual convictions and styles? Not at all! The painter Xianwei Zhu knows how to reconcile all of this and find his own visual language influenced by East and West.
Born in Qingdao in China in 1971 and raised in Zen Buddhism, Xianwei Zhu discovered his love and interest in the West during his art studies at the Shandong and Hangzhou Universities in China. This love led him to Stuttgart to the Academy of Fine Arts, where he completed further studies. As a result, Xianwei Zhu stayed in Germany and intensively studied Western poetry, painting and philosophy - a foreigner exploring his new homeland. Günter Baumann describes Zhu's core idea as follows: "It is about home in a globalized reality." The painter becomes "a wanderer between worlds". Zhu combines the central theme of Ming painting - "nature and harmony" - with the "transcendent loneliness" of a Caspar David Friedrich and asks the viewer in his work - very much in the spirit of Heidegger - the question of existence and temporality.


The viewer's eye wanders incessantly over Zhu's pictures, his depicted landscape does not provide a clearly recognizable perspective, everything seems to shimmer, to blend hazily into one another, a hint of mist settles over the picture - and then suddenly, a mountain peak emerges from the seeming nothingness. The sky merges seamlessly into the mountain stream, the firmament is reflected on the surface of the water, or is it? It is this blending of natural phenomena that conveys the Zen philosophy - there is no longer a discernible boundary, the top becomes the bottom and vice versa. And there is something else that characterizes Zhu's landscape: the human being, who is always small and inconspicuous in the sublime landscape. A clear indication that being human is only part of a larger whole.
Atmospheric pictures, whose interpretation and effect are interpreted individually, whose content is mostly nature. This runs like a common thread through Xianwei Zhu's pictorial world and manifests the raison d'être and existence - but also the finiteness, as it were - of humanity. The painter sees himself as a wanderer, as an explorer of this world, and the viewer of his works is sent on a new search with every intensive look, which always reveals something new.

"People ask about the Han Shan way
Han Shan? No path will lead you there
Here the ice does not melt even late in summer
In the mist the sun rises pale as the moon
And I, how did I succeed?
My mind is not like yours
If your mind were like mine
             Then it would lead you here too"
(Han Shan, Cold Mountain 62, 7th century)


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.