Zhongou Xu, “In the Name of Walnuts, Stack,” mixed media wood cut on rice paper/Photo: Galerie Camille

“Illiminality: Compressed Spaces,” a two-person exhibition of work by Detroit artist Adnan Charara and artist, master printmaker and educator Zhongou Xu of China, opened on April 4 at Galerie Camille. It’s an unlikely pairing at first glance, but upon closer inspection proves to be a compelling examination of the ways in which artists adapt in response to their creative environment. Both artists have endured personal trauma, war and displacement that has shaped their understanding of the world and in turn materially influenced the art they have produced.

Zhongou Xu was born in Sichuan, China in 1952, and by the age of fourteen, he found himself engulfed in the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution. Already singled out for his artistic potential, he found employment painting large murals of Mao Zedong on the walls of his hometown. The universities were closed, so Xu was unable to pursue art education at the time and found work as an elementary school teacher, a job he held for eight years. When the universities reopened in 1976, he applied for admission to the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, where he concentrated his studies in woodcut printing and remained there after graduation to teach until 2001. He is currently president of the Pan Tianshou School of Architecture and Art Design at Ningbo University.

Adnan Charara, “Entropy 1,” acrylic on canvas/Photo: Galerie Camille

Adnan Charara, whose family of Lebanese descent was displaced from their home in Sierra Leone by civil unrest in the late 1970s, arrived in the United States in 1982. He studied architecture at the Massachusetts College of Arts and city planning at Boston University, but was irresistibly drawn to fine art as a way, he says, “to resolve inner conflicts that have arisen from growing up as a foreigner in diverse communities.” “I have always been aware of my identity as an outsider,” he says. His self-directed studies of art have allowed him to master a variety of mediums and modes of visual expression, from installations to print media to painting and sculpture. He uses his virtuosic command of visual idioms from the world’s art history—as well as considerable humor—to express aspects of human condition that connect us all.

In contrast to Charara’s culturally wide-ranging explorations, Xu’s mixed-media prints and calligraphic explorations go deeply into his own history and culture. His work is grounded in his profound understanding of Chinese philosophy and art history. The juxtaposition of the two artists’ work in a shared space invites a dialog between their contrasting backgrounds and their common appreciation for contemporary art practice.

Xu’s mixed-media series “In the Name of Walnuts” marches down the wall of the gallery’s entrance with large red wood-block prints filled with pattern and visual incident. The artworks combine woodcuts collaged onto rice paper and include thinly ruled lines and calligraphy. The sensuous shape of an oversize walnut dominates each composition and metaphorically suggests nature’s generative powers. Created in the 1980s, the “Walnut” series dealt with deeply personal themes of fecundity, fertility and transformation, and because of this did not find an audience in China at the time. But they have endured and can now be appreciated in this contemporary setting.

Zhongou Xu, “In the Name of Walnuts, Roundabout,” mix media wood cut on rice paper/Photo: Galerie Camille

The prominent formal position that Chinese calligraphy holds in Xu’s work is evident in his suite of eight small ink and rice paper compositions, also titled “In the Name of Walnuts: Calligraphy 1-8.” His signature walnut shape bounds turbulent interiors and draws attention to the unique middle ground that calligraphy occupies in Chinese visual art. In contrast to the dichotomy between text and pictures in the West, Chinese calligraphy exists in a continuum of meaning, from characters that approximate Western writing to the more purely visual and intuitive. In Xu’s work, calligraphy often expresses pure energy in motion and portrays time and rhythm within shifting space.

Around the corner of the gallery, as if in ambush, three of Adnan Charara’s large comic canvases confront us. The graffiti-inflected figures sprout extra arms and eyes and form multitudes within themselves. These aggressively cheerful paintings nevertheless project an air of anxiety. The lively cartoon figures appear trapped within an airless white void. They are noisy, yet we hear no sound. They remain strangely cornered in an anonymous space that is no space at all, lost.

Charara describes his work as tracking the course of entropy, the universal process of the gradual breakdown of order into chaos. He suggests that both destruction and transformation occur and relates the process to the ways humans connect and change over time.

Adnan Charara, “Entropy 5,” acrylic on canvas/Photo: Galerie Camille

Coming back out of Charara’s comic lair, we find a row of Xu’s ink and water media paintings on rice paper. They represent a continuation of the series “In the Name of Walnuts,” but now the characteristic walnut shape is less prominent. Vibrant colors and irregular stripes that define their interiors come to the fore. With three fairly new watercolors on rice paper executed in 2024, entitled “Unexpected Arrival 1, 2 and 3,” Xu has eliminated the confines of the walnuts entirely; the colorful interior markings seem to have broken free to float through empty space.

In a small adjoining gallery, a few of Charara’s antic creatures make contact again. “Entropy #5” is populated in the background of the composition with black-and-white line drawings of small figures looking as if they might be preparing to muscle their way into the foreground, if only they can figure out how.

In “Illiminality,” Adnan Charara and Zhongou Xu have brought two vastly different backgrounds to bear on the question of how humans experience change and navigate the boundaries created by their life experiences. Through resilience, optimism and tenacity, each has found a way to survive and thrive within the world as they have found it.

“Illiminality: Compressed Spaces” is on view at Galerie Camille, 4130 Cass Avenue, Detroit, Michigan, through April 26.