Xu Pingyu has worked in many cultural departments, and has served as director of Nanjing Education Bureau, curator of Nanjing Museum, director of Shanghai Cultural Bureau and vice minister of culture. Even during the Cultural Revolution, he was criticized for "shielding" the so-called ghostly black paintings. His collection almost kept pace with the liberation war. 1946, Xu Pingyu, then director of the Communication Department of the Jiangsu-Anhui Border Region Government, officially began to buy paintings and calligraphy works. From then until the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he invested all his income in it, and his living expenses depended entirely on his wife's salary. He even bought a cloth ticket for his son to make clothes for the New Year and made a picture sleeve. The degree of obsession can be seen.
Xu Pingyu's study is called "Yu Lian Zhai", also called "Clear Box Bookstore", which contains many excellent works. From the Ming Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty and then to modern times, many people participated in the research, such as Shao Mi of Wumen, Xia Chang of Kunshan, Xu Wei of Huating, Dong Qichang of Huangshan, Wang of Loudong, Qi Baishi and Huang, and Zhang Daqian and Fu Baoshi of modern times. The most important one is Eight Eccentrics in Yangzhou, which more or less reflects the emotional factors of collecting the works of fellow villagers and also marks his aesthetic orientation.
Modern painters often associate with him, such as Huang, Fu Baoshi, He, Xie, Wu Zuoren, Huang Zhou and Cheng Shifa. Probably because of his work in the cultural field after liberation, many collections are engraved with the above paragraph.
In the autumn of 2006, in the special exhibition of Yu Lian Zhai Tibetan painting shot by Beijing Rongbao, Fu Baoshi's "West Wind Blows Red Rain" has the author's long title, describing their ten-year communication.