Outstanding in his field

He has traveled far and wide looking for them, from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region during the sunflower harvesting season to the Inner Mongolia autonomous region where they were covered with snow, and right on his doorstep in Zhejiang province, where several sunflowers still stood tall and proud, despite the ravages of a devastating typhoon.

In fact, for over a decade, Xu has cultivated sunflowers himself on a plot of land at the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, where he served as the president between 2001 and 2020.

Indeed, "for the last two decades, not a day has passed by without Xu thinking about sunflowers, and not 10 days have passed by without him painting sunflowers", according to the introduction of his latest exhibition in Shanghai.