XUE RUOZHE

Sunlight leaves traces on the canvas, defining the figures and colours, and weaving the artist’s constantly passing life into the plane of painting, silently measuring time. In this series named YYYY-MM-DD, the rotation of distant celestial bodies and their almost invisible trajectories are preserved and revealed through the withering and blossoming of a flower: every day, at about the same time, behind the same vase of flowers, Xue Ruozhe sets up a canvas, blends the colours, paint one of the flowers, then date this flower. One flower a day until all are painted. Time passes, the flowers in the bottle are constantly changing, the buds bloom, and the flowers wither. Xue Ruozhe records their changes with paints, leaving the previously painted ones intact and not covered. After finishing a bottle of flowers, he would put a bunch of fresh flowers into the bottle, and so on and so forth, day after day. In order not to interrupt this continuous action, he set the size of the picture at 50x 40 cm, which happens to fit in his suitcase and be carried around, migrating with him from place to place. From the birth date of Xue Ruozhe’s youngest daughter,

YYYY-MM-DD series will continue until the end of the artist’s life.

In this way, Xue Ruozhe attempts to explore what is the most fundamental and authentic relationship between painting and life, how life draws its own yet-to-be formed contours on the inner plane of painting, and how those things that have faded away over time once again emerge from the gaps in the canvas. In the continuous cycle of YYYY-MM-DD, which is like daily routine, the practice of painting becomes the anchor of the artist’s life. It folds the most tangible life processes, flesh and breath, into a repeating sequence of painting that unfolds slowly like a fan. Through these simple, barely emotional and allegorical flower paintings, Xue Ruozhe seems to be marking his own life, just like we tear off a page of calendar or write a page of diary every day, only in the painter’s most instinctive and essential way; However, each day that has passed, every page on the diary that is about to be turn over and each calendar page that was about to be torn down, was almost effortlessly pressed into the same image space. As time layers overlapped and piled up, the finite surface of the canvas thus reveals its otherwise invisible depth. In this way, it seems Xue Ruozhe wants to tell us that time is not something external to painting. It has actually been lurking at the hinge between image and image, images and canvases, the deep gap that leads to the invisible world. The artist’s work is to explore this overlapping, wandering, and uncertain boundary zone, allowing us to glimpse the original shape of life in the deepest places.