An earthen house stands empty at the edge of a field, its rammed ochre wall holding the last of the afternoon. A fishing village settles into evening. A lane bends out of sight between a white gable and a black tiled roof — and in the canal beneath it, the whole town hangs upside down and slightly darker than it ought to be.
A Country Boy from Zhangpu
Xu Wenyong was born in 1978 into a farming family in Zhangpu County, Fujian, and he has spent his working life painting the countryside he came from. He enrolled at the Fujian Arts and Crafts School in 1997, committed himself entirely to oil painting from 1999, and has worked since as a professional realist landscape painter, now based in Xiamen.
What he paints has barely shifted in a quarter of a century: old dwellings and earthen houses, farm courtyards, fishing villages, the water-towns of Jiangnan, the ordinary dignity of village life. Most painters find a subject and then work outward from it. Xu found his at the start and has been working further into it ever since.
Artist Xu Wenyong / 许文勇油画 (xuwenyong669): Oil Paintings of Villages, Water Towns and Memory
Still a Student at Forty
The detail that says most about him is that in 2019 and 2020, two decades into a professional exhibiting career, he enrolled in an advanced course in Bai Yuping’s studio at the Beijing Fine Art Academy.
Bai is among the most respected contemporary landscape oil painters in China, known above all for atmospheric renderings of northern villages — work in which weather and light do more than description does. That is a pointed choice of teacher for a southern painter of southern subjects, and it suggests Xu went to Beijing for a way of seeing rather than a set of tricks. A painter secure in his own manner at forty-one, who signs up to be corrected again, is telling you what he thinks the work is for.
The Trouble with an Earthen Ring
Among Xu’s exhibited subjects are Fujian’s tulou, the great communal rammed-earth buildings of his home province, and they are one of the hardest structures in Chinese architecture to paint convincingly.
The difficulty starts with the geometry. A tulou is a ring, three or four storys high, and a circle drawn in perspective is an ellipse. The ring’s base and its roofline are two different ellipses, seen from two different heights, opening by two different amounts, with two centers that do not sit above one another. Get that relationship even slightly wrong and the building does not look like a mistake in drawing — it looks like a structure that is sagging on one side or bulging out at the top, and every viewer feels it without being able to say why. There is no straight edge anywhere on the thing to check yourself against.
Then the surface. Rammed earth has no hard edges: the walls slump outward at the foot, erode into the corners, and carry no line anywhere that a brush can lean on. Worse for a painter, the entire mass is a single ochre. There is no local color variation to help describe form, so the whole enormous curved volume has to be turned by tone alone — a graded warm-to-cool shift across a wall the color of dust, holding its roundness across four storys without ever going gray. It is closer to painting a cliff than a house, and it is why Xu’s tulou pictures reward the second look far more than they reward the first.
Painting Against the Clock
Plein-air work — 写生, painting from life in front of the motif — has been at the center of Xu’s method since the beginning, and in his case it carries a weight it does not carry for other painters.
A studio painter working from a bowl of fruit can restage the subject tomorrow. Xu cannot. The villages he paints are emptying: the old courtyards fall in, the tiled roofs go, the families leave for the cities, and a house that stands this spring may be rubble the next. One of his series is called Empty Nest; another is Old Houses; another, Tulou Dwellers. These are not picturesque titles. They are a record of depopulation.
Which changes what plein-air is for. A photograph would preserve the building perfectly well and in a fraction of the time. What a painting preserves that a photograph cannot is the looking — the two or three hours a person stood in front of a dying house and paid attention to it, and the hundred decisions about light and weight and emphasis that attention produced. Xu’s countryside pictures are documents of a place, and also documents of somebody having bothered. In fifty years the second will matter as much as the first.
Atmosphere Over Inventory
The lesson that runs through his mature work, and that his time with Bai Yuping sharpened, is that realism is not accumulation. It is selection.
A painting in which every roof tile, every leaf and every stone is equally described does not read as more real; it reads as false, and for a precise optical reason. A human eye can hold only one distance in sharp focus at a time, and everything nearer or further softens. A picture with total focus throughout presents the viewer with an experience they have never had, and the brain rejects it — which is why an obsessively detailed landscape so often looks stiff and lifeless despite the labor in it.
So the skill is losing edges: deciding where the picture is in focus and then having the discipline to let the rest go soft, thin and unresolved. The old roofline gets its exact sag; the trees behind it become a mass of tone with no branch drawn at all. What looks like generosity of detail in Xu’s best pictures is really the opposite — a small number of things described fully because everything else was surrendered.
Jiangnan, and the Water That Is Not a Mirror
His Jiangnan water-town scenes — the ancient stone bridges, the white walls and black tiles, the lanes running down to the canal — hand him a subject in which roughly half the picture is a reflection, and reflections are where realist painters are most often caught out.
Water does not return a mirror image. It returns the scene as it would be seen from a viewpoint below the surface, so a reflection shows more of a bridge’s underside and less of its parapet than the bridge itself does. It compresses: reflections run toward the middle, the bright whitewashed wall coming back duller and the black roof coming back lighter than either really is. And the surface tilts. Every ripple presents a small facet angled at the sky, so a canal on a blue day is threaded with blue that belongs to nothing standing beside it.
Paint the reflection as an upside-down copy and the canal turns to glass, and the whole town goes with it. Xu’s water sits flat and wet, and holds the buildings loosely, which is the difference between a village on a canal and a village on a mirror.
One of his canal paintings shows how he gets there. The houses along the water go in first in warm ochres and weathered pinks, with laundry hung on bamboo poles from the balconies and a small boat moored below. Then the water: long, loose strokes of the sky’s colors, broken by the dark shapes of the houses coming back upside down and a little dimmer. With the tip of a small palette knife he flicks in a pair of white ducks and the short broken lines of their wake. A tree in full golden leaf on the near bank closes the scene, and the canvas turns out to be a long panorama of the whole waterfront.
A Persimmon Is a Pun
Read the titles of his paintings in a row and something becomes obvious that no single picture would tell you: a great many of them are not descriptions. They are wishes.
《家有喜柿》 — the house has joyful persimmons. The joke, and it is an old and entirely serious joke, is that 柿 (persimmon) and 事 (affairs, events) are said the same way, so a house with persimmons is a house with happy events in it. 《和和美美》 — harmony and beauty — is a lotus painting, because 荷 (lotus) is 和 (harmony). 《紫气东来》, purple vapor arriving from the east, is the phrase for an auspicious sign approaching. 《日照金山》 is sun gilding a snow peak, which is a real dawn phenomenon and also, said aloud, a small fortune. Kumquats announce the New Year. And once, squarely, the Earth God himself — 福德正神, white-bearded, robed, a tiger at his feet.
This is not decoration bolted onto landscape painting. It is a different commission from the one a Western landscapist accepts. A painting that carries a wish has to survive being read before it is looked at. Someone will hang it in a new house, or give it at a wedding, or put it behind a desk, and it has to do its work from across the room, in one second, to a person who is not looking for brushwork.
That imposes rules. The persimmons have to be unmistakably persimmons — not orange masses that a painter would find more interesting — and they have to be plural, and ripe, and hanging. The lotus has to be open. The gold on the peak has to actually read as gold, not as a warm gray that a colorist would prefer. Every one of these is a constraint on exactly the thing a landscape painter most enjoys giving up, which is literal legibility.
What is worth noticing is that he does not solve it by flattening the picture into a sign. The persimmon paintings are full of things that have nothing to do with the wish — a bicycle against a wall, a stone step worn into a dip, a thread of smoke. He satisfies the reading in about two seconds and then keeps painting for the person who stays.
Pictures with a Job to Do
Alongside the exhibited village series runs a warmer, franker strand: auspicious folk subjects. He paints persimmons in an old house, playing on the pun that gives the pictures their name — 柿柿如意, persimmon sounding like the word for affairs, so that a bowl of orange fruit becomes a wish that all your affairs go as you would like. He paints 紫气东来, the purple auspice arriving from the east. He paints the Land God of village tradition.
It would be easy to file these as the commercial half of a career and leave it there. They are more interesting than that, because they belong to an older idea of what a painting is: not an object of contemplation but an object with a function, hung in a particular room to do a particular thing for the family living in it. That function was largely abandoned by the gallery tradition, and Xu practices both without apparent tension — mourning a vanishing countryside in one series and wishing his viewers good fortune in the next. Both are pictures made for a wall in a home. Only the register changes.
Smoke From a Roof You Left
The words he keeps returning to for the village paintings are not about painting at all: 故乡, 乡愁, 记忆 — hometown, homesickness, memory.
The pictures themselves are consistent to the point of being a single place: old stone-and-mortar walls, deep-eaved tile roofs stacked up a slope, a persimmon tree with its leaves gone and the fruit still on, a wooden door standing open, and — nearly always — one very small human being. A woman with a broom in a swept yard. A figure on a bridge. A child. They are two or three centimeters tall in a picture that is a meter wide.
That scale is the whole trick, and it is harder than it looks. Make the figure larger and the painting becomes a scene about a person, and the village turns into a backdrop. Remove the figure entirely and the same village reads as abandoned — beautiful, and dead, which is a completely different and much colder picture. The tiny figure is what tells you the smoke coming out of that roof is somebody’s dinner. It has to be small enough not to compete and unmistakable enough not to be missed, and it has to be painted in about six strokes, because at that size a seventh stroke makes it a doll.
He is in his late forties and grew up in a Fujian village. Nobody paints this subject again and again because the roof tiles are interesting.
From the Provincial Biennial to an Open Studio
Xu’s work has been selected repeatedly for Fujian’s provincial exhibitions, among them several editions of the Donghai Wave new-artist shows and the Bamin Danqing Fujian Art Biennale, and it has traveled across the strait in cross-strait exhibitions in Xiamen and Taiwan, where pieces from his Old Dwellings and Autumn Mood series were acquired by Taiwanese collectors. Along the way he has taken excellence and special-contribution awards at provincial and regional level.
He also works with the studio door open. His studio in Xiamen, 许文勇艺术, is hung wall to wall with framed village scenes, interiors and old dwellings, with gardenias flowering in the little yard outside. He shares his paintings as they are made with a simple invitation — let’s learn to paint together, come inside the painting. There is no reason a painter with an exhibition record has to do this. He does it anyway.
Qikou, on the Yellow River
And then there is the other half of the work, which carries no wish in its title at all — just a place name.
《碛口古镇》. 《碛口民居》. 《义合古镇》. 《大米村民居》. Qikou is a Ming and Qing river port on the Yellow River, in the loess country of Shanxi, roughly two thousand kilometers north of Fujian: yellow earth, cave dwellings cut into hillsides, stone-paved lanes going down to a river the color of milky tea. It looks nothing whatsoever like the place he comes from.
Painting it is a color problem before it is anything else. His southern subjects are built on green and white — canal water, whitewash, wet leaves — and the whole picture can be tuned around that contrast. Loess country has no green to tune against and no white at all. Everything is a variety of ochre: the ground, the walls, the road, the river, the dust in the air. Getting a picture to hold together when every single note in it is within a narrow band of yellow-brown means the drawing has to carry the load that color usually carries, and the small temperature shifts between one ochre and the next have to be judged much more finely than any green ever needs to be.
The northern paintings are, for that reason, the best evidence in his work that the facility is real. Anyone can look accomplished on a subject that hands them a contrast. Doing it on a hillside where nothing contrasts with anything is a different examination, and he goes north and sits it voluntarily.
Art Comes from Life
The phrase is his own, and it is the plainest possible statement of a position he has held for twenty-five years: that a landscape is worth painting because it is somebody’s home, and that the way to paint it is to go and stand in it.
What he leaves behind will be partly a visual record of a Fujian that is physically disappearing — the earthen rings, the courtyards, the fishing villages — and partly the example of how he made it: slowly, from life, and with the door open to anyone who wanted to watch.
Xu Wenyong’s gift is a kind of remembering — the patient insistence that an old house, a quiet field, a fading village are worth the trouble of being seen, and painted, before they are gone.
See his work on Douyin: 许文勇油画 (xuwenyong669) · a village painting · Jiangnan old architecture. All artwork and video © 许文勇, shown with credit.