Xianwei Zhu has developed into one of the most interesting landscape painters in recent years. In gestural, spontaneous painting acts, he combines the ideal of the soul landscape in the sense of German Romanticism, especially Caspar David Friedrich's, with the philosophical insights of Zen: mountain and river become one in order to rejoin in the viewer's inner image to form the overall view. The look back to the future is directed at the magic of nature and aims at a conscious experience of our environment, which is increasingly threatened. The fact that Xianwei Zhu finds his motifs on the Danube or in the Chinese mountains is a reference to the real landscape. However, he is concerned with the fictional localization of an idea of nature that leads us to the spiritual maturity to really respect it. The painter makes use of literary as well as philosophical reflections from Friedrich Hölderlin to Martin Heidegger, always with regard to the great tradition of East Asian painting.