Asides about Rao Fu and his paintings
Translated by Michael Haggerty
Today I find myself in the difficult position of making use of writing in order to fully investigate the paintings by Rao Fu, a young painter of Chinese origins (Beijing 1978) but by now resident for a decade in Dresden in the former German Democratic Republic. I say ‘difficult’ because there are already many essays about him1: what can I add so that the viewers, though left alone to immerse themselves in the painting and interpret it in their own way, can deal with it with the best-adapted tools? I don’t have at my back a long-standing knowledge or frequentation of his work that would allow me to speak with the ease of an old friend, I can only follow my sensations and weave together the threads of the many hints his works refer back to, without any temporal or geographical limits, and move from his personal life to recent events, from reality to dreams, from quotations to daring inventions, from monochrome to a rich range of colours, from veils of paint to clotted material. Perhaps Rao Fu has had the fate of finding himself at such a crossroads of time and culture that he can whirl in a dance of strong colours, the bright contrasts of latent or actual tragedy.
Space and Time
Where did Rao Fu come from and where is he now? How does he live, paint, and why? I can only attempt to give an answer to these questions. Rao Fu was born in Beijing but grew up in Shandong, the region his family came from. There his grandfather was the most well-read person in the village: he wrote the new year’s calligraphic greetings for every family. Rao Fu, after having studied graphic design in the capital, had the opportunity of moving to Dresden in Germany, the state capital of Saxony and a city with a great cultural tradition. He studied German and became aware that it was painting that most interested him. He became a pupil of professor Kerbach. In the city museums (Albertinum and the Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister) he discovered many masterpieces from remote times that became favourites: Rembrandt, Rubens, Brueghel, Vermeer. Or less remote times: Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich, the Impressionists, Felix Vallotton, Expressionism. And contemporary artists: Baselitz, Marlene Dumas, Gerard Richter (present with his archives at the Albertinum). He became part of a group of artists who worked sporadically at installing exhibitions and this gave him the opportunity of being in direct contact with the works. He could look at the brushstrokes and discover states of being, just as with Chinese calligraphy. He was permeated by the moods that the canvases communicated while he stopped and looked at them close-up and without hurry. He came to have a familiarity with them that he could never have had with works of art from his own country.
Fig.1‘Jugend und Technik’
It is moving to enter Rao Fu ’s studio: it seems we are going back in time. For me, so familiar with Italian settings and the People’s Republic of China, it is a fine surprise to enter the courtyard of an old house in the ‘new’ part of Dresden (which in fact is not all that recent) in which various people work: musicians, dancers, yoga teachers, painters, sculptors … The structures have remained what they once were, rather run-down, but the spirit is right. I do not give importance to the exterior aspect, everything is in a kind of creative and relaxed disorder that allows me to guess there is free thought at large. I discover that I love this aspect of a certain German culture: its capacity to go straight to the heart of matters without losing itself in the frills of appearance. Having climbed the stairs, we arrive at two rooms that act as the studio of Rao Fu. The most fascinating one resembles a cave which is entered through a hatch held open by a rather shaky counterweight. Will it work? Yes, and inside there is another world. It is like entering a place where there have been deposited the memories of generations, due to the very fact that someone has made them live again: the painter’s creativity has been given free rein. I discover that this young Chinese man has grown fond of images, atmospheres, and objects that I thought could only move a European. There are issues upon issue of a magazine called ‘Jugend und Technik’(fig.1) dating back to the end of the 1950s, typical of the 'DDR' (Deutsche Democratische Republik), and I suddenly remember that for many years there was a deep link, a privileged channel, between communist China and Eastern European countries. They are little magazines that are severe, serious, concrete, mainly in black and white, that illustrate the latest technical and scientific advances and that suggest very complex ‘do-it-yourself’ experiments. The images are mostly of machines and factories and are sober, well-ordered; the machinery is worked on by young people wholly caught up in ‘constructing the future’.
Fig.2
Then there are albums of black and white or sepia photos(fig.2), with faded images and comments written with a fountain pen; they are the memories of families from the past who have drifted apart and been forced to get rid of things. There is an old stove, no longer working, that acts as a table top, there are piles of art books, and canvases hung almost everywhere, at random, in an organic disorder that stimulates spontaneous associations. There are dark and disordered corners, inaccessible spaces, there is all the fascination of a past that reaches us without a break. I realise that what I can see here is a heritage that Rao Fu uses fully for constructing a complex and multifaceted image, the ‘mirror’ in which he looks every day: his paintings. It is as though age did not count: those images, these objects that are older than him and that belong to another culture, are ‘about him’: I think I understand that Rao Fu is someone who experiences the links with the past in a visceral manner. Not through rational reconstruction but in a quite personal, intimate way. The testimonies of past events, whether in Germany or elsewhere, make him nostalgic for the places of his childhood, which he will never see again because they have been destroyed or radically altered. I would be tempted to suggest that Rao Fu, in an earlier incarnation, lived in Germany. I cannot prove this nor is it important: what counts is that he sees himself in the environment that surrounds him and to the construction of which he makes his own contribution. He actively participates in it by creating with his painting links that supersede apparent distances and touch on hidden harmonies and analogies.
The Dance of Life
Fig.3-5
I asked Rao Fu if he remembers from where he began to paint the large painting that is now in front of us (Infinitrace, 2019, 220 x 435 cm)(P.29), and if he follows any particular habits. With a rather malicious smile he told me that when he finds himself in front of an untouched canvas he loves to deal with it with ample movements, in a dance in which he opens his arms in order to contain everything that already exists in nuce, and that he will discover slowly as he paints. The paintbrush is loaded with brown paint, that bituminous colour that was the protagonist of many paintings from recent years and that he continues to use frequently, drawn in long, fluid lines and curves.(fig.3) I seem to imagine that this is the most enjoyable moment of creating, everything pervaded by an almost Dionysian sense of intoxication. As Taoist thought reminds us, the first mark of the brush is the one that faces the initial emptiness, and from it are born the second and then the other ten thousand. Now there is the question of harmonising the differences. Of counterposing the voids and fullness, the curved lines and the flashes of direct light that cut across the canvas with a movement similar to a Z, with diagonals that divide and link spaces and times.(fig.4) At times this movement advances due to associations that proceed (I imagine) a slight feeling in the gut, a part of the brain – or perhaps the eye. A twisted human figure, borrowed from a painting by Titian, alludes to the continuous confrontation with art history; I believe this bloomed from the artist’s hand before from his mind. (fig.5)
And he lets himself go, curious to discover what else is pressing to be released, and then takes back the role of producer who relates together each protagonist in such a way that it is coherent with everything else. The initial monochrome is modified with the addition of increasingly brilliant colours, with juxtapositions that do not attempt to pacify but to maintain the tension. There are just a few poisonous colours, often used pure as the Expressionists did. In this large-scale canvas Rao Fu creates a kind of fresco that links history to current events (the black figures to the right are perhaps inspired by contemporary violence), and the rigour of some architectural structures to the spontaneous development of mountains ranges and masses of clouds, similar to human faces. Within the ring-shaped building on the left, probably a large stadium, a sculpture burns: is this a hint of social and political content? The painter asks himself this and outs it forward as a suggestion at the same time. Like a channel, he permits the flow of energy through it and discovers with surprise the forms originated by his hand. First he generates them and then gives them an interpretation that is not univocal but almost a journey towards the interior, one with which he arrives at his own deep and hidden self. He feels himself a hero and a brigand at the same time.
During this development he is aided by the years he devoted to art-therapy, years that revealed to him that less “structured” people, such as children (first of all his two children Yipu and Duoya) and those who suffer from “mental illnesses”, are directly linked to their interiority. Perhaps the melancholy that hovers over many of his paintings is generated by an awareness of having lost forever that original ingenuity and to be destined to carry the heavy burden that the world always imposes on artists.
Elective Affinities
The faces of the figures by Rao Fu, with outlines that are only hinted at and with two simple, empty circles for eyes, could well recall children’s drawings, but they are far more disturbing. They also allude quite obviously to the artist who is perhaps the most loved by Rao Fu: Edward Munch. Rao Fu appreciates Munch’s ability to pictorially translate in a fundamental and powerful manner such highly intense feelings as love, pain, and death. He is touched by the unmediated expressivity of the paintings by the Norwegian master, by a use of lines that reminds him (above all in the engravings) of the great Chinese tradition. He is struck by the repetition of certain themes on which Munch persisted because they are the most true, profound, and human ones. They are pure emotions, but distilled by the torment of life, and they gush out with the immediacy of a xieyi2 by Badashanren3.
The world of Rao Fu is vaster than that of those compatriots of his who have remained in China, and also of his German colleagues: he has at his disposal a range of visual and cultural stimuli in which to dip with both hands without qualms, aware that we are all linked together, that nobody creates from nothing but that everything is in continuous evolution. And so, while there are still some who insist that “the East must not be inspired by the West” for fear of losing face or perhaps for a badly hidden new kind of national pride, Rao Fu calmly lists the names of the painters he loves the most and with whom he feels he has something in common. He ranges, as I have already said, from yesterday to today, but also from the East to the West. From Russian icons to the murals of Dunhuang, Marlene Dumas, Giorgio Morandi, Luc Tuymans, Fan Kuan, Daniel Richter, Ma Yuan, Peter Doig, Neo Rauch, and Dandang4.
A seasoned storyteller or expert alchemist, Rao Fu constructs his large recent canvases like extremely complex mosaics, carefully dosing every detail. The small paintings relate to the large ones like the single chapters of a novel relate to the final, vast, and developed work. It is true that the atmospheres are at times dark, the tones dramatic as in a world invaded by all the “evils” after the opening of Pandora’s box. But thanks to what has remained at the bottom of the box - hope, which here I intend to consider a creative force - it is perhaps possible to overcome the impasse of a resignedly pessimistic vision of life and the role of the artist.
1 By Constanze von Marlin, Andreas Schmid, Fanny Weinquin
2 Literally, to write the idea. A kind of painting that with the use of a brush and ink speedily and without second thoughts traces out the subject.
3 An “eccentric” Chinese painter on the cusp between the Ming and the Qing dynasties.
4 Dandang 擔當 was a Chinese monk, poet, and painter during the Ming dynasty.