Born in 1993, Dong Xiaochi earned a master's degree from the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom and currently lives and works in both London and Shanghai. Dong's artistic practice is deeply rooted in classical Chinese painting while also exploring the experimental logic of contemporary art. His works exhibit harmonious visual elements that seamlessly blend various aesthetic traditions.

Drawing inspiration from artificial landscapes of different scales, including traditional Chinese gardens, botanical gardens, and miniature ecosystems, Dong explores diverse concepts related to simulating, imitating, and compressing nature. His creative endeavors primarily encompass painting and mixed-media pieces. By creating images saturated with hints of light, humidity and atmosphere, Dong aims to give form to contemporary images of nature.

I chained myself to this landscape. ¹     —— Derek Jarman

Nature is an important protagonist in the history of classical painting. As the source of visible things - from mountains to running water, from green fields to deserts - nature is often understood as a projection, possessing the significance of unveiling the NATURE of the world. In the face of this powerful tradition, artist Dong Xiaochi aspires to discover in his paintings the face of "modern nature" - in particular, the diversity of emotions that result from the presence of plants arranged with a sense of solace. The starting point for Dong's work is the observation of a self-made artificial ecological tank, which provides a miniature ecological environment for domesticated reptiles. As the artist crafts the square habitats, the desire for curiosity and voyeurism gradually transforms into a curiosity about certain aesthetic concepts. The result of this initial impulse is the ink work Rainforest-secret (2018), created with mineral pigments and Chinese brushwork techniques. In this work, Dong regards greenery as slices of classical imagery and places them in a rational, regular, minimalist layout. At the time, the artist was confused by the contradiction between Chinese painting and scientific narrative. While the former depicts the humility and rituals of human beings in the midst of nature, the latter, like the watcher and the watched, emphasises the dangerous relationship between human beings and the environment that play tricks on each other.

¹ Derek Jarman, Modern Nature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, p. 77.

In 2021, Dong travelled to London, England, to study, and Kew Gardens, which he frequented, seemed to provide a temporary answer to his perplexity. This giant eco-district on the outskirts of south-west London dates back to 1759, a time when gardening was all the rage in England. Thanks to the brainchild of Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, this imperial-era botanical garden was also an Eden for nature study. Along with the 18th-century gardens, it was the aesthetics of the landscape that influenced Dong’s work. According to Tom Turner, three concepts influenced the history of English gardens in the 18th century context. Firstly, there was the concept of Beauty, which was applied to cultivated landscapes, mainly in the form of smooth, subtle and gentle visual changes in the 'foreground'. The second is the Sublime, which is often associated with landscapes that are "grand, lurid, and awe-inspiring". These two concepts are well articulated in the philosophical writings of Kant and Burke. Finally, the third concept, Picturesque, gives a very different context, as it is a type of "intermediary aesthetics that is rough, wild, and irregular". ²Among Turner's examples, the botanical paintings of the French painter Pierre-Joseph Redoute typify the intermediary between "beauty" and "picturesque": they provide vitality to the form.

² Tom Turner, British Gardens: History, Philosophy and Design, Chinese Version, 2015, p.278; see original British Gardens published by Taylor & Francis, 2013, Chapter 7.

Like Redouard, Dong Xiaochi has discovered his own way of working through the joy of observing plants. That is to consider the art of cultivation, care and landscaping as "painting". If a horticulturist's job is to paint with plants, an artist's job is to "plant" with paint. In his recent works, Dong firstly uses volcanic soil powder to make a base, just like the subsoil in the ecological tanks he once made, to prepare the "soil" for the "life force". Secondly, he chooses to mix the right proportions between landscape painting - an oriental form of aquascape on paper - and Western painting, mainly in terms of light and dark relationships and perspective. At Kew, William Chambers' replica of the glazed pagoda at the Dabao’en Temple in Nanjing provides an interesting example of the artist's reconciliation of 'landscape'. The only Chinese royal pagoda in Britain at the time challenged the rigidity of aesthetic conventions. In Would Bamboo Bloom (2023), the artist chooses to use "bamboo" as his motif, but boldly submerges the modernist figure of the loner in a dense forest of bamboo. Obviously, for Dong, his paintings that take "nature" as an object are not meant to establish a fixed counterpart to this concept; in fact, like "painting," both are a never-ending process.

For Dong, like painting, the passion aroused by gardens is an integral part of eternal humanity. Given the slightest chance, the artist aspires to preserve the contemporary glamour of both. Another of Dong's subjects is Derek Jarman. The British director, artist, gardener and writer describes his garden in Dungeness, on the Kent coast, in poetic terms in his personal diary, Modern Nature. Built at the end of his life, Jarman once said that the boundary of his garden was the horizon; it has become a place of pilgrimage for contemporary gardens in England. For Dong, Jarman's description in his diary - "Huge rose pergolas run riot." ³——can likewise be seen as a translation of a pictorial effect. Fully trained in Chinese painting, Dong’s works reveal his own life experience between "beauty" and "picturesque". Each of the paintings inspired by plants (including his own pets) evokes in their natural forms an imaginative sense of humidity, color and smell, even if at first glance their tones are closer to the softness of vision that is the hallmark of Chinese painting.

³ Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Garden, with photographs by Howard Sooley, London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1995, p.134.

Dong Xiaochi's fascination with the Jarmanesque "modern nature" has complex threads, a new entity that combines gardens, man-made landscapes, foliage, Romanticism, and Orientalism. For example, in A Gentle Zephyr along the English Channel (2023), the artist juxtaposes the sea breeze and ripples in Jarman's garden, which represents the young artist's landscape-like imagination of identity and emotional expression, as well as a reinterpretation of the contemporary concept of "picturesque". Although the outputs of his works are not very large, these works, which symbolise the natural creation, have a sincere and clear tendency of interest.