Rao Fu China, b. 1978

Rao Fu was born in 1978 in Beijing, China, and has lived and worked in Dresden, Germany, for more than two decades. He left China at the age of twenty-three to study painting and graphics at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (Academy of Fine Arts Dresden), one of Germany's most storied art institutions and the home of the so-called Dresden School of painting. He studied there from 2002 to 2008, before becoming a master student of Professor Ralf Kerbach from 2008 to 2010. He subsequently undertook studies in art therapy and psychology from 2010 to 2012, a broadening of his intellectual formation that deepened his understanding of the psychological dimensions of image-making. It was during his years in Dresden's museums that Rao Fu encountered the paintings of the European Old Masters, whose influence became a formative and lasting presence in his work.

Rao Fu's paintings inhabit a world that is neither fully Eastern nor fully Western, neither strictly historical nor contemporary. His large-scale canvases are populated by ghostlike, semi-transparent figures in period costumes, horses, fiacres, and other allusions to a vanished world, set within immersive landscapes of extraordinary atmospheric range. He employs double and triple perspective, a technique drawn from traditional Chinese painting, to augment the grandeur of his compositions and fold multiple visual fields into a single image. The figures that move through these landscapes merge into their environments, becoming mirrors of emotion rather than autonomous presences. Rao Fu has described his landscapes as reflections of his inner world, open to free interpretation, and this quality of psychological openness gives his work its distinctive tension between the specific and the universal. Works such as Girl behind the tree II (2021-24), Summer night (2024), Blue Guardian (2025), and Urus (2025) demonstrate the sustained formal ambition and narrative mystery of his current practice.

Rao Fu's institutional recognition is substantial. His work is held in the public collections of the Kunstmuseum der Stadt Dresden, the Kunstfonds der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the National Museum of History and Art (MNHA) in Luxembourg, and the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei. He received the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation Artist Fellowship in 2014, a scholarship from the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony in 2014, the Heimspiel Scholarship from the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony in 2016, the scholarship of the 14th Hall Artist of the Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig in 2017, and the "Denkzeit" award of the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony in 2020. His first monograph, Rao Fu: Follow Wind, was published by Kerber Verlag in 2014. He has also been featured as one of the most prominent post-70s and post-80s artists in the book Dissonance: Platform Germany by Mark Gisbourne and Christoph Tannert.

Rao Fu's solo exhibition history spans Germany, Luxembourg, Taiwan, China, France, and the United States. Key presentations include Follow Wind at Kunstverein Junge Kunst, Wolfsburg (2014); Chimerica at the Projektraum Neue Galerie, City Art Gallery Dresden (2016); Paysages Intérieurs at the Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg (2018), where his painting Mermaid entered the collection of the MNHA; Infinitrace at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei (2019); In The Rain at EIGENHEIM Berlin (2020); Combustion in Paris (2021); Dresden in New York (2022); and Flaming Images at Mind Set Art Center, Taipei (2023). Group exhibitions have taken him to the Asian Art Museum of Nice, where his work was shown alongside Zao Wou-ki and Chu Teh-Chun in Landscapes of the Soul (2021); the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Dresden; and Galerie Perrotin, Shanghai, among many others.

Rao Fu is represented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin, which presented his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Dynamische Stille: Gewalt und Lebendigkeit der Farben (Dynamic Stillness: Violence and Vibrancy of Colours), from April to June 2024, accompanied by an artist talk with Dr. Gisbert Porstmann, Director of the Museen der Stadt Dresden and Städtische Galerie. He also participated in the gallery's group exhibition Ecocycle in early 2025. KORNFELD Galerie Berlin has presented Rao Fu's work at a series of leading international art fairs, including Asia Now Paris (2023 and 2024), KIAF Seoul (2024 and 2025), West Bund Art & Design Shanghai (2024), Art Cologne (2024 and 2025), and Art Karlsruhe (2025).

Rao Fu's practice continues to deepen at the intersection of two great painterly traditions, producing a body of work that is as philosophically searching as it is visually compelling, and that asserts, with quiet conviction, the possibility of a universal art that transcends cultural boundaries.