Title: Xiaotong Shen ''Friend No.8''
Artist: Xiaotong Shen (Chinese Artist)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 43.3 x 59.1 inches (110 x 150 cm)
Condition Report: The artwork is in good condition, showing no visible signs of damage or wear.

hen Xiaotong, born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province in 1968, graduated from the Printmaking Department of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1989. He is a painter and currently lives and works in China.

Art style
Shen Xiaotong's art integrates two completely different worldviews, one is the western style of passionate exploration and scientism's fragmentation of experience, and the other is the Chinese style of inward comprehension and dedication to orthodoxy. Its spillover on the experiential level and restraint on the transcendental level are thus integrated into one. We are very pleased to see that in such new paintings, the anxious memories of history, adventures, and adventures are unexpectedly serene and peaceful in the fusion of embellishments, as if they are all aware of the mysterious harmony between themselves and the world, This makes it impossible for us to doubt the existence of "Tao". Shen Xiaotong's new schema seems to be a metaphor for a new realm. In Shen Xiaotong's art, color dots can be aggregated into meaningful lines, just like the rebirth of pen and ink.

Shen Xiaotong was born in Sichuan Province, China, and graduated from the Department of Printmaking, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1989. The Artist explores the art of portrait, still life and landscape with the use of a limited palette of colours, often even only a single colour.


Shen Xiaotong, who has witnessed the evolution of contemporary Chinese art over the last decades and the impact of Western trends and concepts in art, has firmly embraced the observation and expression of the world around him through his painting. His artistic practice distances itself from cultural rebellion and focuses on the human being as an individual, and on the space around him. Portraits of childhood friends and relatives, flowers, bamboo, and enigmatic mountains are essential subjects in the artist's work. As Xu Sheng accurately manifested: “Shen’s paintings remind us of the fact that there is no painting, there is no image, and there is no language. There are but strokes of paint left on the canvas. These strokes are not a signifier of the relation between the painter and his works, because artworks are conceptual and abstract as well.”


Shen Xiaotong is one of the neo-expressionists artists influenced by senior Southwestern artists, such as Zhang Xiao-Gang and Zhou Chun-Ya. The artist has participated in some of the most significant Chinese contemporary art exhibitions like China Avant-Garde, 1989, Beijing and New Art from China: Post-1989, Hong Kong. He held his first solo exhibition in Beijing in 1994 and more recently in 2022, the Long Museum in Shanghai honoured him with the retrospective “Shen Xiaotong´s painting” solo exhibition, covering the artist’s work during the last decade.