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 him*: 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.
