Su Xiaobai

Su Xiaobai was born in 1949 in Wuhan, Hubei province, China. His early training took place at the School of Arts and Crafts in Wuhan from 1965 to 1970. From 1985 to 1987 he attended an oil painting seminar at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. In 1987 he left China for Germany and undertook postgraduate study and a master class at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, continuing there into the early 1990s; he later became a member of the Association of Dusseldorf Artists 1844.

Around 2003, working for a period in Fujian province, Su Xiaobai shifted his primary medium from oil on canvas toward lacquer built up in thick layers over wood panel, a material he continued to crack, sand, and rework, moving his practice toward a hybrid of painting and sculptural relief. He has since exhibited widely in China, Europe, and Southeast Asia and today lives and works between Shanghai and Dusseldorf.

Su Xiaobai's work has been positioned within surveys of Chinese abstraction rather than treated as an isolated practice. He has appeared in group exhibitions including Jing Shen: The Act of Painting in Contemporary China at PAC in Milan (2015) and The World Is Yours, as Well as Ours at White Cube, Mason's Yard, in London (2016), both of which framed his lacquer-and-panel works alongside other Chinese and international abstract painters. His selection for a 2026 Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale, organized with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Su Xiaobai Foundation, represents his most significant institutional endorsement to date. No verified, exact verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be located for this profile; available written material is primarily gallery, foundation, and institutional program text rather than independent criticism.

Su Xiaobai's market runs on two tracks that are not yet fully reconciled in public data. His gallery, Tina Keng Gallery, reported record-breaking sales of his work at its Art Basel Hong Kong booth in 2026, a primary-market and art-fair result rather than an auction outcome. No single auction result, work, price, house, and date together, could be independently confirmed as an all-time record from the sources reviewed for this profile. Aggregator data from MutualArt references realized prices for paintings reportedly as high as USD 593,161 across a set of roughly 94 tracked auction works, but does not attach that figure to a specific work, sale date, or auction house, so it cannot be cited as a confirmed record. Taken together, the evidence points to a market still thin and only partially documented at auction, with most of the artist's commercial activity running through galleries and institutional exhibitions rather than the secondary market.

Su Xiaobai's public auction history is short and only partly documented, and the sources consulted for this profile disagree on how high that history actually runs, which is reason for caution before treating any single number as a settled record. There is no published catalogue raisonne; verification of a work currently rests with Tina Keng Gallery, Pearl Lam Galleries, and the Su Xiaobai Foundation, which was established to preserve and present his archive. His clearest forward-looking signal is institutional rather than transactional: the 2026 Venice Biennale collateral exhibition with LACMA is a meaningful validation, but it has not yet been matched by a correspondingly deep or transparent secondary market.