Firing, 2023
Xue Ruozhe, born in 1987, Xuzhou, China. He lives and works in Beijing.
Nothing is more disconcerting than a work by Xue Ruozhe. Using painting as his main artistic approach, Xue's works explore the recontextualization and reenchantment of figurative painting in the contemporary context, in the gap between painting and imagery, painting and its own history.
As he himself explains: "What I want to represent is my state of mind, somewhere between reality and the virtual world. I think it's the absurdity hidden in our daily lives that inspires me. When I run out of ideas, I go in search of a crowd, in the busiest streets of Beijing or London, to observe people's gestures, and the way they relate to each other."
Why are we fascinated by these paintings? Firstly, because they differ technically from the paintings known from contemporary figurative art. Color tones ranging from blue to gray lend the works a melancholy aura that the painter lets live on in his work. Secondly, the reality represented by Xue Ruozhe is always fractured. The characters never fully face us, the scenery is always cut off. We are left to reconstitute a logical meaning within an unstable, evolving whole.
Xue Ruozhe's works have been widely exhibited in galleries and institutions, including the GAFA Art Museum in Guangzhou, the Wuhan Art Museum, the Tate Modern in London and the Zhangzhou Art Museum. He has been shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2022.