Xiao Fan Ru

Born into a family of scholars, Xiao Fan Ru took up calligraphy at an early age. After studying at the Beaux-Arts de Nankin (1977-1982), he moved to France and continued his training at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, graduating in 1986.

In China, bamboo has always been a favorite subject of artists, poets and philosophers. In recent years, it has become one of the motifs in Xiao Fan Ru's paintings and sculptures. The artist shows its simplicity and the elegance of its lines, its capacity to bend without breaking, to surround and protect, but also reveals its more hidden, metaphysical and spiritual meaning, relating to the Confucian tradition of the search for the golden mean.

The idea is to draw inspiration from the bamboo's momentum and move forward in an infinite spiral movement, in harmony with nature and the world. Following these principles, the shape of the circle represents a path (the tao) where emptiness offers itself to inner resonance, to the circulation of breath. Cicadas, whose moulting is another metaphor in ancient Chinese culture, resting on bamboos are symbols of life, death and rebirth.

This happy medium is golden in our troubled times, and so it is on these philosophical foundations that Xiao Fan Ru has named " The Golden Way" this series of sculptures co-created with ColAAb, including 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 weight. It's an invitation to let go of the weight of the world through ordinary regulation, fairness". - Xiao Fan Ru

Xiao Fan Ru is a laureate of the Casa Velázquez in Madrid (1988 and 1990). His work has been exhibited in France at the Centre Pompidou (1989), MAC Lyon (2005), Musée Cernuschi (Paris, 2011) and Musée Guimet (Paris, 2020). In China, monographs have been dedicated to him at the Shanghai Fine Arts Museum (2005), the Rong Kun Fine Art Museum in Beijing (2014) and the Suzhou Museum devoted a retrospective to him in 2017.

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