Rao Fu's paintings are at once fascinating and baffling. His pictorical worlds are so composotionally complex that do not fit properly into the tradition of European painting genres, as the large-format work "Pavilion" from 2010 indicates. Bizarre rock formations rise out of the Landscape only to be interrupted by foggy abstract sections. A river meanders gently across the plain and is straddled by a bridge that steers the viewer's gaze into the depths of the image towards a pavilion, which crowns the entire landscape. The foreground consists of abstract color fields bordered by barren trees at the painting's margins. Human figures are embedded in the scenery sometimes clearly, as on the bridge, sometimes almost disappearing into their surroundings. The pictoral elements offer no narrative cohesion, just as the landscape is made up of diverse fragments whose scale and perspective are mismatched. The European idea of a painting with central perspective, where the projected space is divided up geometrically and proportions decrease gradually, was conceived to represent reality as completely as possible in its three dimensions. In contrast to this stands the centuries-old guiding principle of Chinese art, according to which a landscape must be seen from numerous standpoints in order to be comprehended. Rather than naturalistic representation, Rao Fu is primarily interested in conveying a mood and atmosphere that stimulates feelings in the viewer.
The gulf between the historical concept of landscape painting in Europa and China could hardly be wider. While in antiquity the role of European landscape painting was already regarded by art theory as auxiliary, and given only limited rights as an independent artistic genre, in China it is a key from of expression in both traditional and contemporary art. The Chinese term for landscape painting "shan shui hua", which translates literally as "mountain-water-painting", resonates with the 1,500-year-old guiding maxim that tension and harmony should be created between contrasting elements: solid and fluid, vertical and horizontal, moving and unmoving. This artistic tradition unquestionably informs the reflective sphere of all contemporary Chinese landscape painters, even if their work marks a radical departure from traditional painting and is often combined with Western practices.
Rao Fu’s paintings are also influenced by Eastern and Western cultures, just as his own background unites these two poles. Fu was born in Beijing and grew up in Qingdao. In his early twenties he came to Germany to study painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. Everything he learned there about the Western art tradition he combines with the techniques, imagery and materials used in Chinese painting, where the most important utensils are paper, pen and ink. After much experimentation - with soy sauce among other things - he began painting with bitumen, which he still uses today in combines the characteristics of Western oil painting with pigment and oil paint. Being water-soluble, the oily black-brown bitumen combines the characteristics of Western oil painting with the vast range of expression in Chinese ink painting. The choice of brush, the absorbency of the paper, and the amount of water used can all alter the intensity of the paint’s application. Rao Fu’s images feature the most elaborate details in conjunction with sparing, almost coarse lines, which suggest their subject in just a few brush strokes. His palette, however, is limited to dark, earthy black, brown, and Grey tones that are complemented with accents in blue, red, and occasionally yellow.
Rao Fu’s early painting series are characterised by their economy of means. These images draw on the aesthetics of transparency, reduction, and placelessness used so frequently in Chinese ink paintings for portraits, genre painting as well as depictions of animals and plants. Often these images simply portray a single human figure, plant, or animal in very few lines on untreated paper. Between 2005 and 2006 Rao Fu painted panda bears devoid of all auxiliary context. Adeptly he combines imagery from the most diverse of sources, feeding on everyday observations, visual memories, art historical references, advertising, and news images form both cultural and social contexts, but increasingly transforming them into his own visual language in the painting process. Understanding and misunderstanding in intercultural dialogue can result in humorous ways of revealing the clichées on both sides. “Thüringer” shows a child holding the famous Thüringer bratwurst in its right hand, and a little panda, the national symbol of China, in the other. Behind this, Fu explains, is a longing for identity. His worldview was essentially formed in China where he grew up, but since moving to Germany it has been infused with new and very different experiences. As a child his grandfather taught him the art of calligraphy, which allows him to synthesize not only the imagery but also the techniques used in the painting traditions of both cultural contexts.
For the artist the name refers to a Utopian place where the culture of the East (China) is combined both pictorially and thematically with that of the West (America). The paintings are also hybrids, or chimeras. “Chimerica IV” brings together stylistic devices and ideas form across Rao Fu’s entire oeuvre. Many of the scenes are populated by figures that stare directly out at the viewer with round, empty eyes. These figures spring from his fascination with the mask-like black-and white markings of the fur on a panda’s face. In reference to this Rao Fu often gives his figures mask-like facial features that conceal their identities and keep the anecdotal out of the figurative. Small-format paintings made from 2009 on wards, “Meal II” for example or “Dead Grandma”, depict mostly domestic scenes, painted snapshots of family life, although the facial expressions of the people in them often resemble masks or animals heads. These genre painting start to feel contradictory when unease leaks into the harmless if not cheerful family scenes with the monstrous faces. The scenes demonstrate the universality of their themes for both cultural contexts. Momentarily they are lifted out of the flow of time, not because of their importance as individual paintings, but because for the viewer they offer a universal point of identification. The painting technique of applying washes with strokes of the brush, of paint that diffuses unevenly, and forms that flow into one another without defined contours is an explicit reference to a Chinese aesthetic, which aims to convey the movement that allows things to continuously and imperceptibly shift from on state to the next. Creative power is clearly attributed to nature and only adapted for art by man.
Colour in the work of Rao Fu ist often limited to highly nuanced shades of dark brown bitumen. In “Mirage” a complex landscape unfolds from rocks, veils of cloud, plants and figures, all of which are worked out of a single brown tone. The Chinese ink wash technique is particularly suited to creating the versatile interplay of light and dark, dry and wet, clear and blurred, which keeps the image hovering on the sought-after border between existence and non-existence. Because traditional Chinese landscape paintings were often used as aids for meditation the artists eschewed excessive use of color, which would only distract the viewer. The collage “Chimerica VI” can thus be read as a reference to Western painting, which is based on distinct forms and high-contrast, opaque colours.
Recently Rao Fu has developed a new style in his painting, which can be seen as a synthesis of the various image series that came before. Using collage as a compositional principle, in 2014 he began a series of works whose flatness is emphasized by the non-hierarchical arrangement of their pictorial elements. In “Bobbin Winder” Fu generates tension primarily through polarities such as the contrast between white and black, painterly and graphic, or representational and concrete. The geometric forms are particularly noticeable, as they are not integrated into the painting’s implied narrative flow. Hard outlines of triangles and circles encounter fluid painterly gestures. During the working process Fu increasingly distances himself from his visual sources of inspiration so that expressive content of the paintings originates in his imagination rather than having any necessary relationship with what is depicted. These works have clearly moved beyond the limits of traditional Chinese landscape painting. In Chinese the term “feng jing” was first used for artworks which, influenced by the study of Western traditions, were painted in oils. Translated literally it means “wind view”, “wind” describes both the character and characteristics of a landscape as well as an attitude. Thus Rao Fu’s choice of the title for the exhibition as well as a painting of the same name can be seen to indicate a modus ooerandi. “Follow Wind” is a loose translation of “sui feng”, which means “with the wind” but also “following intuition”. Even among Rao Fu’s generation of artists there remains a keen awareness for the technical but also philosophical resources of the Chinese painting tradition. Here the artist gives free rein to his thoughts while working, and moves the brush without trying to influence the painting process as it unfolds.
