Perrotin Shanghai is pleased to present Colors of the Soul, Rao Fu’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Rao Fu’s paintings resemble a restless sea of color. On each canvas, a new, free monologue begins, driven by the flow of paint. Embedded within the color are deeply resonant references to tradition, evidencing the engagement of this Chinese-born artist, trained in classical Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy, with the art history of Dresden and Europe of the last four hundred years. Indeed, there is hardly a painter in East Germany who has studied German and European painting with such earnestness, marveling at its diversity, boldness and beauty, appreciating it and appropriating it in his very own way.
Fu might well be one of the last traditionalists still eager to learn from his environment, to preserve what he has learnt and to share this knowledge with the world through his own pictorial language. Increasingly, we observe that young German artists, whether in Dresden or elsewhere, have little knowledge of, and respect for, the richness of the culture into which they were born. They prefer to devote themselves to the superficialities of the art market and the discursive doctrines shaped in universities on the East and West coast of the USA. Fu, on the other hand, continually draws on seams of tradition, cites, interprets, empathizes and shares his experiences of other painters’ works, conveying his visual impressions through dialogical arrangements of colors.
Fu situates himself in a global art space that first and foremost fascinates him, but also challenges and encourages him, a space of attention that he consciously supplies on his own terms. For him, the wealth of art from around the world that can be found in German museums — especially in Dresden, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (HfBK) from 2002 to 2010 and where he has lived since 2002 — is a common cultural resource.
He is particularly fond of mass scenes and arrangements of figures. The European Baroque period comes to mind, but also the turn of the twentieth century. Eloquent examples in his current production are Market (2024), Summer Night II (2024) and Wedding Banquet (2024), which is inspired by Pieter Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding from 1567 — with the notable exception that Fu’s rendition depicts a catastrophic incident rather than a festive party. In Baroque Fantasy (2024), he similarly dramatizes the pictorial atmosphere by incorporating, at the bottom left of the image, a human figure that resembles the famous allegorical personification in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I from 1514 (albeit reversed).
Fu’s conglomerations of figures and group constellations often seem in thrall to fatalistic behavior. Their activism appears thwarted, enlivened only by the fluctuations of color and form. In several chapters, Fu shows the dichotomy of desire and reality, the changes and contradictions of a vision of man and the world conditioned by history and the present. The fundamental mood pervading these scenes ranges from romantic and idyllic to melancholic. The condensation of the groups of figures reflects experiences of confinement and hopelessness. From a German or European perspective, one is inevitably reminded of the disheartening scenes of migration across the continent.
Fu fires up the dilemma between freedom of movement and group dynamics in enforced confinement with a fabulous intensity of color that has become one of his trademarks. He lights up the anxiety-inducing banality of daily life with the luminosity of colors in such a way that his images seem to rejoice with hope in spite of a despairing reality. He uses color in defensive anticipation of the terrible. His paintings do not allow for resignation. Madame Orchid (2024), for example, is a song of praise to the power of painting, stylized like an awards ceremony. At the same time, it is French in its symbolism and self-confidently universalist in its recreation of the world through color.
Area Knight (2024), which leans towards abstraction, is equally remarkable, a painting bursting with passion, powerful gestures and energy that seems just as connected to the Dresden powerhouse of early twentieth-century painting as to all the centrifuges of Abstract Expressionism. Fu’s images are so compressed in color that their allure has a near-magical quality that lets them shine in all their mysterious beauty. Even a long-term study would not be able to weaken the spell they cast on the beholder.
Text by Christoph Tannert, director of Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin
Born in 1978 in Beijing, China
Lives and works in Dresden, Germany
Dresden is traditionally a city of painters, Rao Fu is the only one among them with Chinese roots. What he has implanted in Saxon Neo-expressionism is tantamount to a live cell treatment. His experimentation with painting materials and his all-encompassing range — from Chinese landscape painting to the magical triangle Munch-Doig-Daniel Richter — owes itself to pure color experiences, and has been achieving monumental formats since 2019. Rao Fu follows the Chinese technique of using color to reinforce the atmospheric. The influences of traditional calligraphy combine with colorenergetic aspects and figure painting that progressively takes up the entire image space; it reveals a style, a wish to fashion something with the aim of harnessing the widest variety of pictorial categories and interlinking a great deal with a great many. Rao Fu shows us that whatever is yonder is not far from us, but completely local and present. It is no longer about what is foreign and what is ours. This is because there no longer exists, or rather there never has been a pure, i.e. hermetic culture that, having arisen sealed off and isolated from others, can be sure of its unchangeable identity. Rao Fu's pictures do not speak so much to a cultural difference, but rather to the current discourse on cultural hybridity — being on the offensive within variables; and roaring in a great voyage across the seas of colors.
More about the artist
