Whether the Chinese-born artist Rao Fu, who lives in Germany and Asia, can be considered an example of the globalisation of the art world remains to be seen. At any rate, his work is anything but an instance of homogenised art production, because Fu is an idiosyncratic artist, and his practice a complex phenomenon.
He has chosen Dresden, Saxony’s artistic and cultural capital, as his main residence since 2002, deeply immersing himself in German everyday life and the specificities of ‘Dresden-ness’ in art,[1] while at the same time creating what you could term ‘world art’, namely, a body of work whose semantics can only be grasped as a totality of various cultural influences and formal vocabularies. Looking back, he notes: ‘When I started painting in Dresden, I realised, more than in my home country, that I would never be anyone other than the person I am. But in the class of Prof. Kerbach I acquired that Dresden-ness, which opened up new dimensions in my work.’[2] In our conversation, he is keen to emphasise that he is not rooted in any particular language or country,[3] adding that this is also a way of defying the gatekeepers of the art market who decide which concepts are included in the repertoire of world art and which are not.
In today’s globalised and post-colonial world, the contexts and forms of migration are manifold and omnipresent. In Fu’s work, Asian mythology and European baroque with a Dresden inflection overlap, further expanded by his reception of the Old Masters in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie and the works of Edvard Munch, Daniel Richter and Peter Doig. For Fu, like any mindful painter, also takes sustenance from the work of his peers. He entrusts himself to other voices, which he registers, reminisces, reacts to and modulates in a disparate constellation of attentional stimulation in which art is an echo of art.
In Fu’s paintings there are zones where the gaze gets stuck or where it changes direction and reorients itself. These works are particularly successful when, during their making, they have taken an unexpected turn that astonishes even their maker. Fu says that he lets himself be guided in the process of painting: ‘My paintings sort of paint themselves.’[4]
Fu narrates from different places and times, from ‘today’ and ‘back then’ and from times in between. There are echoes of art from other epochs, tying in with a reflection on the art of today and the question what distinguishes the present from the past or the future. Can simultaneity be represented? Of course it can! Fu is a master at drifting through times and places, in circumstances that instantly transform themselves into a true, present feeling, into a pulsating, intense, exciting or shattering moment of perception, as in Panda or Sailing Towards a Deserted Island I.
Fu paints landscapes populated by figures yet without hints to specific locations or seasons. They could also be images of clouds or projected ideas that survive time merely because they are captured in a painting. They could just as well be memories that have been stirred up, or completely unknown phenomena for which there is no explanation at all. All this is bathed in rich colour that snatches it from oblivion. Fu lays down traces of something that slowly emerges and animates our senses, disturbs our perspective and claws its way into our dreams.
Germany is a beautiful country. But it is slowly losing its long-established, comforting habits. Resentment wherever you go. Some observers have made out deep rifts running through society. Fu is not unaffected by these changes, as he sits in the same boat. Each of his paintings reflects his inner soul, yet it is impossible to distinguish between what is really happening deep inside of him and what is the figment of his character’s imagination. But there are no explicit forms of representation. Everything is a fluctuating allusion or metaphor, discreet, trickling away, fizzling out, yet inescapable.
The constant crescendi and diminuendi in Night Feast, Feast Goers and A Part of Mirage seem to have been caused by violent gusts of wind. In places, the painterly gesture is dramatic, culminating in colourful bursts of power. It tells of the inner struggle against a world that is hostile to life itself. But then comes the surrender: we are not heroes of our own lives. Everything is not in our hands. We are only human and have to accept our finiteness.
Fu’s art is always also about the awareness that our time is limited. He is certain that in every intentional work of art, there are empty spaces, as philosopher Roman Ingarden has shown in his theory of indeterminacy.[5] These spaces are filled by the artists and the spectators with individual experiences originating from our own world. And because the world changes, so do our interpretations. But works of art intrinsically leave room for our life experiences.
Quite a few of Fu’s paintings have a surrealist touch. Blurs allow ghostly beings to appear. Spurred by his interest in the intrusion of the alien into everyday life, the artist searches for pictorial metaphors for the turmoils of the subconscious, often using an unusual context or a misleading caption to shift the effect of his paintings in unexpected directions. He uses irritation as a means to liberate the mind. Cloudy colour formations morph into figures that seem to emerge from nebulous realms. The colour seems to bubble over. Fu plays the chords of the nightmarish that Edvard Munch mastered so well. But because he is fundamentally not interested in shock-and-awe but in well-temperedness, the mysterious, ambiguous nature of his paintings makes for a cosy experience. His paintings do not stun viewers, they seduce them. A few heaving hills, a couple of swaying figures, a rumbling spirit of colour are enough to take us into a world of phantoms. Much disappears in the darkness of shadows or dissolves in the colour traces of memory and conjecture. Details are lost in the dissolution of contours. Landscapes first blur on the canvas, then in the eye of the beholder; of some figures we see nothing but eye sockets, a mouth, the translucency of vagueness that turns them into floating faces from which Fu elicits fascinating painterly allure in restless compositions.
That ghostly quality is particularly evident in the ceramic sculptures Fu has been making since 2021. To this day, he has created a good dozen figures, filled with almost childlike energy, all unique pieces, mostly about 60 cm high, glazed to all kinds of surprising effects. Extending his practice into the third dimension, these sculptures are additions to his painterly iconography but also exist autonomously in that they depart from a strict rendering of the figure in favour of a sweeping, gestural approach to the material. Fu plays with the principle of figuration. Figuration and abstraction merge as their distinctions are abolished. The gnomes and trolls populating his paintings are created in the same way.
For most of his paintings, Fu first produces small-format watercolour sketches in which everything that he draws or captures already becomes a main event. What is exciting here is not so much his choice of motif but the way he resolves or translates it into colour. Some of these watercolours are restrained rather than offensive in composition. They do not anticipate what might happen later on the canvas. They are like test tracks for unverified assumptions, relating to the painterly theatricals like delicate, almost lyrical approaches. He gleefully plays with chance and conscious design.
Together, Fu’s paintings form a projection screen for the artist’s poetic feelings towards the incomprehensible, between admiration and distance, sometimes oppressively introspective, sometimes corresponding with the ominous. At the same time, they are never so abstract as to prevent spectators from relating them to current events in Europe, and never so clearly narrative as to lose themselves in unartistic platitudes. Fu has found a way of interpreting reality that touches the reality of society just as much as the reality of painting. Instead of plain one-to-one transposition, he offers a higher kind of realism. The meaning of his paintings is not restricted to readily available statements but lies in the ambiguity that results from the duality of colour and form. Their beauty lies in an in-between. At times they are riddles that coincide with their resolution. Several perspectives and interpretations become entangled with each other – a stylistic device that allows the artist to indefinitely defer each attempt at interpretation so as to constantly include other readings. The aesthetic bounty of their colour-form constellation offers possibilities for versatile perception as well as creative catachresis. Fu’s paintings are effectively concrete and yet labyrinthine. They can sedate and at the same time confuse the viewer’s gaze. In this instance, we might recall Felix Philipp Ingold, who asserted that, ‘The representation, the reflection of reality is not yet a truth, nor is it art [...] the truth of art is the reality it creates and which it is.’[6] Just as Ingold improvises, Fu paints his paintings in an ongoing process, one painting providing the impetus for the next. Realities are thus perpetuated, new realities created.
Fu sees his own emotional state of mind as an amplifier of the wider social mood. The displaced subject in today’s situation of global existential threat, particularly in relation to the endangered planet as a whole, bears special meaning for him. There is always some kind of potential danger: anxiety, being lost, trembling (see Girl Behind the Tree). Fu’s paintings do not lead us over solid ground but rather onto risky and uncotrollable terrain. From a painterly point of view, these salutary errings and confusions are highly attractive.
[1] Cultures have been overlapping in Dresden for many centuries. They have been irrigated by currents of myth-forming localness, which has developed into continuities that have endured to this day. Dresden-ness can be understood as a hybrid of different painterly conceptions, but with a basic aesthetic penchant for sensuality and exuberant use of colour. Crucial to Dresden’s status as a capital of the arts is the accumulation of artistic treasures in the eighteenth century, the likes of which northern Europe had not yet seen. First of all, there is the Baroque pictorial heritage, then the pictorial expressions of Classicism and Romanticism between 1790 and 1810, the plein-air painting of the Goppeln School, Robert Sterl’s Dresden brand of Impressionism, Neo-Romanticism and Art Nouveau, the powerhouse of Dresden’s Brücke Expressionism at the beginning of the twentieth century, the second generation of Expressionism in the Gruppe 1919, Oskar Kokoschka’s sensual colour mountains, the world of New Objectivity, the memory of war in Otto Dix’s work and, last but not least, a strong line of tradition that grew out of the Dresden Secession of 1931.
[2] The artist in conversation with the author in his studio in Dresden on 27 April 2023.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Roman Ingarden, ‘Konkretisation und Rekonstruktion’ (1968), in Rezeptionsästhetik. Theorie und Praxis, ed. Rainer Warning (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1975), 42–70.
[6] Felix Philipp Ingold, Freie Hand. Ein Vademecum durch kritische, poetische und private Wälder (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1996).
