RAO FU
Dresden, Germany 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 colour experiences, and has been achieving monumental formats since 2019.
Rao Fu follows the Chinese technique of using colour to reinforce the atmospheric. The influences of traditional calligraphy combine with colourenergetic 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.
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 colours.
Text courtesy Christoph Tannert, Direktor Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin.
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