Xiao Fan Ru

Born into a literary family, Xiao Fan Ru was initiated into calligraphy early on. After studies at the School of Fine Arts of Nanking in China (1977-1982), he moved to France and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, graduating in 1986.

In China, bamboo has always been the artists, poets and philosophers’ favorite subject. In recent years, it has become one of the motifs of Xiao Fan Ru’s paintings and sculptures. It shows its simplicity and the elegance of its lines, its resistance, its capacity to bend without breaking, to surround and protect, by the strength of its eternal return. It also evokes its more hidden, metaphysical, spiritual meaning, according to the Confucian tradition of the search for the middle ground. The idea is to be inspired by the momentum of the bamboo and to progress in an infinite spiral movement, in harmony with nature and the world. According to these principles, the shape of the circle, open, represents a way (the tao) where the emptiness is offered to the inner resonance, to the circulation of the breath. The cicadas, whose moult is another metaphor in ancient Chinese culture, rest on the bamboo trees, symbolizing life, death and rebirth.

Xiao Fan Ru has named his series of furniture-sculptures co-created with ColAAb “La Voie d’or”, which includes the coffee table presented at Private Choice in 2023.

« La Voie d’or is a bronze table combining the fragile and the resistant, grace and gravity. It is an invitation to shed the weight of the world through the regulation of ordinary use, the rightness ».

Xiao Fan Ru was the laureate of the Casa Velazquez in Madrid (1988 and 1990). His works were exhibited in France at the Centre Pompidou (1989), at the MAC in Lyon (2005), at the Cernuschi Museum (Paris, 2011), at the Guimet Museum (Paris, 2020). In China, his works were exhibited at the Beaux-Arts Museum in Shanghai (2005), at the Rong Kun Fine Art Museum in Beijing (2014) and a retrospective of his works was held at the Suzhou Museum in 2017.

Presentation based on a text by Pascale Le Thorel for ColAAb.