The international contemporary art group exhibition, “Touching the Void: Art Without an Object” opened to the public from December 19 to 21, 2025, at TheBlanc Gallery (15 E 40th St, New York, NY) in Manhattan, New York. This exhibition explores how art can capture and present the immaterial—spirit, memory, and states of being—in a contemporary context where materiality grows increasingly ambiguous.

Among the participating artists, Chinese painter Xie Jinfa (born 1949) from Suzhou offers a unique and profound perspective through his half-century-long artistic practice and contemporary oil paintings deeply rooted in Eastern aesthetics. 

As a senior craft artist, his artistic journey began with early landscape works and has since developed, with pieces exhibited in a range of domestic and international settings and featured in various publications. For this exhibition, he will present two recent works: “Mountain Village” (2022) and “Flowers” (2024). Though these oil-on-canvas pieces originate from representational subjects, they transcend mere depiction through masterful refinement of brushwork, color, and texture, ascending to philosophical inquiries into cultural roots, personal memory, and the essence of life.

“Mountain Village” (2022)

Photo Courtesy: Xie Jinfa

Within its 60cm × 60cm square format, “Mountain Village” is not a simple representation of a pastoral idyll. With near-expressionist passion, the artist constructs a landscape that navigates the boundary between figuration and abstraction through blocks of color, textured surfaces, and decisive knife strokes. The forms of rocks, houses, and trees are distilled and rearranged, evoking the state of memory itself under the erosion of time—simultaneously concrete and vague, stable yet fluid.

At its core, this work is an act of “visual archaeology.” Using oil paint as his tool, Xie Jinfa excavates the cultural strata sedimented within individual and collective unconsciousness. The traditional lyrical ideal of “a dwelling place for the soul” found in classical Chinese landscape painting is replaced here by a more complex historical sensibility—one that involves a search for roots while confronting the sense of loss inherent in transition. “Mountain Village” thus transforms into a spiritual coordinate, a psychological landscape attempting to anchor the self amidst the torrents of modernization.

“Flowers” (2024)

Photo Courtesy: Xie Jinfa

“Flowers,” of the same dimensions, demonstrates the artist’s contemporary breakthrough within the still-life tradition. This is not merely a bouquet arranged for visual pleasure, but a vital existence endowed with strong subjectivity and conceptual depth. Through liberated brushwork and intensely dynamic color, Xie Jinfa allows petals and leaves to break free from representational constraints, becoming direct carriers of emotion and energy. Xie’s vibrant compositions invite viewers to experience nature not as a static object, but as a living, breathing force, pulsating with life and spirit.

In this painting, “flowers” become a polyphonic metaphor: they embody the eruption of life force, bear witness to the transience of time, and perhaps pose a pure inquiry into the very nature of beauty. The heavy layering of pigment and the traces of the palette knife transform the painting process itself into a visible ritual. It invites viewers to move beyond asking “what does it resemble?” and instead feel the inherent, nearly abstract harmony and tension composed by color, texture, and form.

This international exhibition, bridging cultures and generations, showcases the diverse forms of contemporary art and aims to provoke deeper resonance regarding existence, memory, and the value of the immaterial. Xie Jinfa’s works, with their profound local grounding and highly personalized visual language, provide a distinct Eastern perspective on the exhibition’s theme of “Touching the Void.” The “void” he touches is not absolute emptiness, but the vast realm behind concrete objects (mountains, flowers)—a realm concerned with memory, cultural identity, and enduring spirit. What his palette knife builds up is not only vibrant oil paint but also the weight of time and the texture of longing.