Teaching the classical canon

Xu Lele is a young female artist from Nanjing who brings the great tradition of literati painting in China into a humorous, almost satirical, contemporary idiom. The scene of the scholar seated, in his long flowing robes, on the dais and beside him the young acolyte reading the text, surrounded by the scholar's accoutrements of scrolls, inkstone and brush, is a typical composition of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). But here the amusingly droll expressions on the faces of scholar and acolyte, and the eloquent modelling of the brush washes, betray a late twentieth-century modernity. Xu belongs to a group of artists living and working in Nanjing, many of whom have received some 'Western' art training, and who are committed to instilling Chinese painting traditions with the spirit and imagination of the modern age.

Art Gallery Handbook, 1999. pg. 266.