Both of the two artists of this exhibition graduated from the First Studio of Oil Painting Department of Central Academy of Fine Arts and focus on landscape painting. Though study in the same studio, they have different painting style and perception. Xu Xiaodong’s landscape oil paintings are both epic magnificent and refined with great care, implying love and understanding to nature in his works and revealing his obsession to the nature. He emphasizes echo of light and sense of harmony formed by all things in the nature in his works. Xu Xiaodong applies different brushwork for mountains, rivers in open country and streetscape in city, for works in earlier years and those in recent, which shows his unremitting efforts and pursuit on road of art. Xu has made continuous progress and breakthrough whether on use of color or arrangement on spaces and time.

Lin Mao's landscape oil paintings display imago pursuit to landscape. His works strengthen more on oil color and meaningful representation of landscape. His brush strokes are concise, perceptual, rhythmic and poetic and he endows landscape with obvious idyllic feeling. Lin Maoo's landscape oil paintings are not just a copy to nature but a reconstruction to poetical nature.

Xu Xiaodong & Lin Mao's landscape paintings seem even far from utility in this unrest and rapid changing society. They seek a harmonious and quiet temperament in their paintings and unique viewpoint of seeing the nature, which gives viewers a magnanimous mind to feel nature. Xu Xiaodong and Lin Mao inherit tradition of Chinese landscape paintings and depict contemporary Chinese landscape paintings through development and innovation. They also go abroad to draw beautiful scenery of the world, which adds new colors to evolution of landscape oil paintings with their assiduous efforts.