Bin Xu

Lives and works in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China

Artist statement

I paint because I do not have the answers. The Sorrow of Life began after I lost a loved one. What stayed with me is the oldest fact we share: life flows away from its very beginning — not at the end, but from the first moment. I do not think death is despair. Sometimes it is a release, and perhaps it carries a hope of its own. What I keep asking is what a life is worth while it is still here, and how a new one should be received. I paint inside a second question I cannot solve: what is left of a human being in an age that can now make images, words and decisions without us? I do not answer it from outside. I work by hand, in oil, in Shenzhen — slowly, in layers, with a body that gets tired. That is my side of the argument: not nostalgia for the old ways, but the belief that an image a machine can produce and one a person must still make by hand are not the same thing. What locks us is also what shapes us. I do not believe the answer comes from AI alone, or from our humanity alone; it comes from the two together. I am not yet sure what that will make of us. I ask what a human being is still worth. I do not have the answer. I keep painting.

Artwork