Traveller: Zhang Xiaoli

With the rules set, scenes unfold. Following the traveller’s footsteps to the banks of the Yangtze and Huai rivers, Learning after Shenzhou's Famous Scenic Views of the Two Rivers restages Shen Zhou’s Ming-dynasty album leaves like jump-cut scenes on a stage. Notes on Painting the Yuntai Mountain reaches further back, to Gu Kaizhi’s ancient conception of a landscape scroll. Xiaoli draws her visual vocabulary from mountain forms spanning the Wei–Jin to early Tang periods, finding her way through the silence left by the text. The tradition of landscape painting is permeated with such classical subjects, repeatedly revived and transformed across generations. For more than a millennium, each artist’s response has been a restaging of the same “script” within a theatre of their own.

As the journey shifts from traversing mountains and rivers to lingering between the macro and the micro, Waters of Spring and Three Realms appear on another scale. In Waters of Spring, landscape turns toward abstraction: rocks condense into crystalline and conical forms, while water flows as warm, winding lines across the surface. Layers of mineral pigment and gold settle into the translucency of silk, producing a soft haze, as if forms have yet to fully solidify. Here, there is no classical model to follow. What emerges instead is an attention to underlying order: branches that echo blood vessels, mycelium, nerve endings—forms that seem unrelated share a deeper logic of growth.

Three Realms presents a continuously shifting spatial structure, organized around the idea of a “conduit.” Mountain, water, cloud, and fire transform into one another, while fingerprints, meteors, lava, flames, and Möbius strips form a system of actively shifting signs. Within a near-monochrome field, space appears both continuous and layered, as boundaries dissolve and matter merges. The “conduit” points toward latent possibilities embedded within time and space. If Waters of Spring lingers before formation, Three Realms suggests what follows: dissolution not as an end, but as another beginning.

A “cyber stage” enables another kind of dialogue across time. In works involving AI, traditional landscape painting and Zhang Xiaoli’s personal visual language are reimagined through contemporary technology. She feeds her earlier works into a system, generating images through recombination, then selects, revises, and reconstructs them. The results resemble her style, yet their internal logic often slips and fractures. She describes the process as a conversation with someone intoxicated, language that seems coherent, yet ultimately fails to hold together. Her task is to reorganize these “drunken” fragments into images that cohere. This method loosens compositional control; randomness and disorder open up a new kind of freedom. Magnolia, Pine, and Lotus take shape through this process. As the AI enters the act of making, the boundaries of authorship begin to blur. Within this theater, a question lingers: who, in the end, is performing this play?