Zhai Xuanhong
b. 1987, Changde, Hunan, China · Lives and works in Shanghai, China
Zhai Xuanhong is a Chinese visual artist whose practice is rooted in painting while extending beyond the conventions of a single medium. Working across oil painting, illuminated surfaces and painting installations, he approaches material as a means of testing how perception, physical experience and lived memory can be translated into visual form. Rather than defining his work through categories or materials, Zhai places emphasis on the act of making itself and on the sensitivity of the hand to surface, texture and change.
His earlier Derivation series developed during his years in Chongqing and was closely connected to his observations of vitality, desire and resilience. Characterised by intense colour and forms that appear to expand outward, these works reflect an interest in the force of life and the relationship between the individual and the external world. After moving to Shanghai in 2017, his practice gradually shifted towards restraint, order and inward observation. This transition led to the White Scenery series, in which trees, foliage and fragments of natural light found within the urban environment became recurring subjects.
Light functions in these works not simply as illumination but as an active pictorial and structural material. Layers of oil paint are applied to translucent polycarbonate surfaces and activated by internal and ambient light. Changes in illumination alter the visibility, density and spatial depth of the image, allowing the work to move continuously between appearance and disappearance. Brushwork, pigment, material thickness and light therefore participate together in the construction of the image, transforming time from an abstract concept into a perceptible part of the viewing experience.
Alongside these works, Zhai's Untitled Black Line series reduces imagery and narrative to the fundamental elements of point, line and plane. Drawing on the rhythms of writing and graffiti, overlapping lines register bodily movement and emotional traces while returning attention to the internal possibilities of painting itself. Across these different bodies of work, Zhai's practice develops through an ongoing dialogue between personal experience, material experimentation, nature and the changing conditions of perception.
