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 EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND 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 showcases its simplicity and the elegance of its lines, its ability to bend without breaking, to surround and protect, but also reveals its more hidden, metaphysical, and spiritual meaning, related to the Confucian tradition of seeking the middle ground.

It's about drawing inspiration from the momentum of bamboo and progressing, in an infinite spiral movement, in harmony with nature and the world. Following these principles, the circle shape represents a path (the Tao) where emptiness offers itself to inner resonance, to the circulation of breath. The cicadas, whose molting is another metaphor in ancient Chinese culture, placed on the bamboos, are symbols of life, death, and rebirth.

This middle ground is golden in our troubled times, and it is on these philosophical foundations that Xiao Fan Ru named this series of sculptures co-created with ColAAb « The Golden Path » , which includes the coffee table presented at Private Choice in 2023.

« The Golden Path is a bronze table combining the fragile and the resistant, grace and heaviness. It is an invitation to shed the weight of the world through ordinary regulation, fairness ». – Xiao Fan Ru

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

Presentation taken from the text by Pascale Le Thorel for ColAAb.