徐永祥

Biography

Xu Yong Xiang

Born in 1930, a native of Yixing, Jiangsu Province, he is the earliest oil painter trained from the Eastern China Branch of the Central Academy of Fine Arts after the founding of the Republic. After graduation in the fifties, he has been engaged in popularization of artistic creative work. He has published over sixty spring festival pictures, picture posters and picture story books, and won wide acclaim. He has been among the first winners being awarded honor in China for the picture story book. After the sixties, he devoted all efforts in oil painting and many of his works have been collected by groups and individuals both in China and abroad.

After graduation from the painting department of the Eastern China Branch of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he was a research fellow for two years. Later he began to teach and became an excellent teacher as well as an art theorist with fervent, full of challenging character and eloquence. In recent years, he has been Chairman of Zhejiang Provincial Art Critic Association. He firmly believes the creative method of integration between realism and romanticism is a sound creative method but by no means the only creative method. He holds that different schools and styles should be treated equally, without discrimination. He considers, in the realm of art, there also exists an “ecological balance” and different schools and styles should be incorporated.

In 1981 he took part in teaching and creative work of the second studio of the oil painting department headed by Mo Pu. He became the director of school library between 1983 and 1986 and held the post of dean between 1987 and 1990. During his work as teacher, he trained a number of students, of which many are outstanding. As far as his individual style is concerned, his paintings are primarily a combination of realistic style and romanticist conception in pursuit of lyric conception and modeling beauty. With a solid sketch foundation and coloring skill, he made all-out effort to fuse coloring, brushwork and sketch in his works. He draws his materials from a wide range of objects covering people, landscapes and still objects, and many of them are excellent.

Union. In retrospect today, such art practice of Xu, being in the then state of Chinese oil paining, is considered most valuable.