Xu Ning was born in 1979, in Beijing, China. She moved to Japan with her family in 2006 after graduating with a degree in oil painting from Capital Normal University in Beijing, and completed her doctoral degree program in painting at Tama Art University Graduate School in 2020. In the same year she was awarded the Grand Prix of Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2020. She currently lives and works in the Kanagawa prefecture.

In her practice, Xu has been greatly influenced by her encounters and discoveries of matters that transcend time, national borders, and genres, from the ancient thoughts of her native China, to the true to life reality of Netherlandish painting such as the works of Jan van Eyck, the decorativeness and innovation of Dolce & Gabbana’s fashion, the beauty of nature, and the ephemerality of life.

Xu’s work illustrate her painstaking precision of painting fields of color and lines one by one upon a large canvas using a fine-point brush (a brush with an extremely thin and elongated tip). At the same time, she enables the coexistence of fortuity created through the splashing and dripping of paint, which together with the vividness of her palette as well as the contrast between the textured areas and flat white spaces, serve to generate a sense of dynamism and vigor.