While many young Chinese artists mimic the style of Western artists, Wu Xiaohai chose to express himself through the ancient technique of charcoal drawing on paper. Trained as a mural painter at Beijing School of Fine Arts, he can work on very large formats ... This young Chinese artist addresses the question of reality in a very personal way. Against the tide.

There is nothing reactionary in the work of Wu Xiaohai, which expresses his vision of the universe with a minimum of means. Drawing by drawing, he seems to be composing a puzzle, not unlike a portrait of humanity: a collective memory or  a message for tomorrow ...      

The scenes are fragmented, yet eloquent. Or rather, they are charged with a narrative about to take place ... It is up to our vision to establish the links that will create the story ... provided that there is one! The two children recurring in several drawings seem condemned to live in a jerky sketch that continues from one drawing to another, and sometimes within the drawing itself. This constant shift is a way to question reality. What is reality? Does reality actually exist? What are we living? Where are we? Yesterday, today, tomorrow?

Wu Xiaohai records on paper traces of memories or fragments of becoming. Who knows? Were these beheaded people executed before his eyes? And who are all these children gathered in a small suitcase? Migrants or the promise of a human "baggage" heavy with promises?

Playing with disproportion, the artist shows that what is distant can be close and what is close can be distant. He makes us think ... through an almost surrealmise en abîme, insofar as his reading of reality certainly transcends reality itself...

Rarely shown in France so far, Wu Xiaohai’s work has already been noticed byBeaux Arts magazine, which elected him among the ten most promising artists of the year. (Beaux Arts magazine296-02/2009, p.46-57 "10 young artists for tomorrow").