Outstanding in his field

In particular, through painting, sculpting and writing about sunflowers, he says he hopes "to use them to represent our generation", as Xu believes the collective portrait of the plant embodies the life, as well as the spirituality, of his generation.

Born in Fuzhou, capital city of Fujian province, in 1955, Xu graduated from the China Academy of Art with a major in oil painting in 1982. In 1988, he went to study at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg in Germany. Four years later, Xu returned to teach at his alma mater.

The defining moment of Xu's career as an artist, as he recalls, came on a day in August 2003.

On a cultural trip to Turkiye with a group of Chinese artists, he happened to see swaths of sunflowers near the Sea of Marmara.

"I was suddenly confronted with an expanse of withering sunflowers standing in the setting sun," he says. "And they struck me as if they were made of steel and copper, blended with the earth."

"I thought I saw a legion of aged troops, or indeed ourselves," Xu says.