by Mia Butter // Feb. 17, 2025
This article is part of our artist Spotlight Series.
Bubblegum pink, lime green and burnt orange are some of the many colors one can find in a Rao Fu painting. Born in 1978 in China, Fu has been based in Dresden for over 20 years. His works sit at a crossroads between two cultures: trained in classical Chinese landscape painting, the artist also seems to reference the past few hundred years of European art history. Maybe the reason it feels so difficult to define Rao Fu’s practice is because it is best defined broadly, as a composite. It would be a disservice to attempt to label these works—which take inspiration from both his Chinese and German influences—as purely fauvist, Miriam Cahn-esque, Munchist or Doig-like neo-expressionist works. But with these in mind, it should come as no surprise that the artist combines the real and the dream-like, blurring the lines between the two.
Rao Fu: ‘Am Ufer,’ 2024, oil on canvas, 37 x 50 cm // Photo by Herbert Boswank, courtesy the artist and KORNFELD Galerie Berlin
In a recent group show at 68projects by Kornfeld Galerie in Berlin, co-presented with the Korean gallery Seojung Art, Fu showed two paintings alongside a group of artists from Germany and Korea. Under the title ‘Ecocycle,’ the show references basic human needs under the umbrella of bionomics. His works ‘In the Rain’ and ‘Am Ufer,’ both from 2024, highlight two very different landscapes. In ‘Am Ufer,’ a small, crowded boat with figures on it–some human-like, others just dabs of orange or a purple swill–eases along the riverbank, the people’s faces turned around to the viewer. As if unexpectedly caught, their “eyes” meet yours, and yet they’re so abstract it feels almost impossible.
Rao Fu: ‘In the Rain,’ 2024, acrylics on canvas, 115 x 165 cm // Courtesy the artist and KORNFELD Galerie Berlin
‘In the Rain’ features a hillside, lined with red and green trees. We look from above down onto a steeple, houses and a road that escapes into the distance. A quieter painting than ‘Am Ufer,’ the hills mimic the sway of a Van Gogh, the shaded hillside all in blue and indigo. Almost blended into the earth tones and the blues, a cherubic figure holding an umbrella appears–with those eyes again. Orange and blue, and outlined to create holes, or rather portals, these bright works carry a subtly tense undertone, bringing in a welcome complexity to the works.
Rao Fu: ‘ohne Titel,’ 2024, porcelain, 41,5 x 22,5 x 25,5 cm // Courtesy the artist and KORNFELD Galerie Berlin
Fu’s show ‘Flaming Images,’ on view in late 2023 at the Mind Set Art Center in Taipei, featured an array of his paintings from previous years, as well as a less highlighted part of his practice, his ceramic sculptures, which are scraped, pressed and glazed into speaking the same visual language as his paintings. ‘Mountain’ (2023) is a ceramic peak constructed from simplified “heads,” consisting of three holes to create two eyes and a mouth. The muddy glaze drips from the top down, drowning their faces in liquid glass. Other works, such as ‘Revival’ (2023) and ‘Night Time Stories’ (2023), feel like details found in his landscape paintings, like toadstools or morels hidden in the crevices of a tree stump. The artist’s hand can literally be seen in the material, as he contorts the clay, twisting and creating dents with his finger tips.
Rao Fu: ‘crouching girl II,’ 2024, acrylic on canvas, 120 × 92 cm // Photo by Herbert Boswank, courtesy the artist and KORNFELD Galerie Berlin
Exploring the human experience and investigating themes of identity, Rao Fu manages to create an emotionally charged, culturally rooted narrative in his expressionist, at times abstract, works. Following the eye and his trained intuition, the artist rejects the idea of preliminary sketches, leaving the works open and ambiguous, verging on cryptic. The figures he depicts are not quite human and not quite fantasy but enter a more ambiguous territory—unsettling, yet alluring.
Artist Info
Exhibition Info
68projects
Group Show: ‘Ecocycle’
Exhibition: Jan. 24-Feb. 22, 2025
68projects.com
Fasanenstraße 68, 10719 Berlin, click here for map
