Fu Rao is one of the very few Chinese artists born in the 1970s to have won recognition from both Western academia and the market. Born in Beijing in 1978, he graduated from the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University in 2001, then went to Germany to study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a junior contemporary of Gerhard Richter. He has now spent more than 20 years in Dresden, a historic city of art, literature, and classical music, where he has left a mark of his own—being included by the authoritative art-history volume DCV (Dissonance-Platform Germany) among “the most important German artists born after 1970.”

Installation view of Fu Rao: “The Color of the Soul,” Perrotin Shanghai, 2024. “I have never felt the need to attach an Eastern or Western label to myself. My ideal is to be an ‘artist of the world,’” Fu Rao told us. In July, he made a special trip back from Dresden to attend the opening of the exhibition he had spent two years preparing, at Perrotin’s Shanghai space. Outside the studio, he was also planning a monthlong visit with his family in China.

We met the quiet, reserved artist at the opening and talked with him about his work and life over the past several years. A conversation with Fu Rao. The day we met him, he was wearing a black T-shirt and tortoiseshell glasses, looking bright and alert. He spoke softly, with an air of modesty and calm. He told us that he had spent two years preparing the exhibition. Its theme, “The Color of the Soul,” was also a concise summation of this phase of his work: “Color is my perception of the outside world expressed on canvas. Color may bring a sense of crisis or unease, and raise certain questions. For me, it is a path toward the interior, toward the soul.”

That was how Fu Rao explained the exhibition’s title. Installation view of Fu Rao: “The Color of the Soul,” Perrotin Shanghai, 2024. Fu Rao, The Abyss II, 2021–2022. The exhibition occupies two galleries and presents 15 oil paintings, a series of works on paper, and one ceramic sculpture. The earliest work is The Abyss II, a large-scale triptych completed by Fu Rao during 2021; the remaining works were completed successively over the past two years.

As the earliest work in the exhibition, The Abyss II faintly retains traces of the first phase of Fu Rao’s career, his “Brown Period.”

“With this work, I wanted to use a large landscape to present something epic. I wanted to lead viewers on a journey through the painting with me,” Fu Rao told us. Fu Rao, The Market, 2024. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Peasant Wedding, 1567–1568. The newest large-scale work in the exhibition is The Market, inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Peasant Wedding.

“The colors in this work are very rich, and there are many figures. It took me nearly a year and a half to complete,” Fu Rao told us. He generally works on three paintings of roughly this size at the same time in his studio; the period from preparation to completion can sometimes be very long.

“An artist sometimes needs to maintain a certain distance from his work, continually examining it from a completely new perspective. At a certain point, some paintings may even need to be partly destroyed before they can reemerge.” Installation view of Fu Rao: “The Color of the Soul,” Perrotin Shanghai, 2024. Fu Rao, White Hair Clip, 2024. Many of the figures in Fu Rao’s paintings have real-life prototypes, drawn from the family members and friends closest to him.

“Many of the figures in my paintings are connected to people who are very important to me. The girl in White Hair Clip is a kind of miniature portrait of my daughter; the cat beside her is based on our blue cat,” Fu Rao said with a smile. Fu Rao, Water Slide, 2024. Fu Rao, Madame Orchid, 2024. Fu Rao, Masked Knight, 2024. In fact, the four smallest paintings in the exhibition resemble a family portrait.

The boy in Water Slide may be a silhouette of his son. Madame Orchid depicts a figure reminiscent of an operatic character, with something of Fu Rao’s wife in her as well, while Masked Knight has elements of a self-portrait. Installation view of Fu Rao: “The Color of the Soul,” Perrotin Shanghai, 2024. It is not difficult to see that the figures in Fu Rao’s paintings are never given specific forms or facial features. This, too, is connected to an influence he encountered while studying in Germany: in addition to majoring in painting, he completed a master’s degree in art psychotherapy.

While studying art psychotherapy, he worked with many children and conducted extensive research into children’s drawings. He found that children’s depictions of faces were simple and pure—perhaps two circles and a few spare strokes.

“When my daughter draws a person’s face, she does the same thing. Yet the good and evil they express, and all their emotions, are immediately apparent. I think this kind of expression comes closer to the essence of things, so I use the same method when painting figures,” Fu Rao explained of the blurred faces that recur in his work. Fu Rao teaching children calligraphy. Fu Rao told us that his father studied aerospace engineering and his mother studied chemistry; he was the first person in his family to make art a profession.

But this did not come from nowhere. When he was very young, his grandfather had already given him his first lessons in art.

“My grandfather was a rural calligrapher. I began studying calligraphy with him when I was five. I can still remember waking occasionally at night as a child and seeing my grandfather grinding ink alone beneath a lamp, the scent of ink and water filling the air.” His voice grew especially warm as he described the scene.

“My grandfather taught me how to guide the brush and coordinate it with my breathing, so that the lines beneath it would become more alive. This had a profound influence on my later painting.” Fu Rao, The Market (detail), 2024. The free, expressive quality rooted in Chinese traditions that fills Fu Rao’s paintings comes from a love of and fascination with Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting, planted deep in childhood. When he was older—at an age when he might ordinarily have been running wild outdoors—his parents noticed that he preferred to sit inside and draw, so they bought him stacks of art albums to look through and copy.

“At the time, I saw many famous French Impressionist paintings in those albums. It wasn’t until I arrived in Europe that I realized how different the colors in the albums were from the originals. But those albums were extremely important in training my sensitivity to color,” Fu Rao said with a laugh. Fu Rao with a collector in his Dresden studio. Opening of one of Fu Rao’s exhibitions in Germany. After graduating from the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University, Fu Rao came to Germany—at that time, a country very unfamiliar to Chinese students—and to Dresden.

“There was a Dresden school in art history, and it was in competition with the better-known Leipzig school for a long time. Dresden’s museums have excellent collections of the Old Masters. Richter and Baselitz both made work in this city,” Fu Rao told us. During his student years, students from the same or different studios often gathered to discuss what they were working on and which artistic currents interested them. That tradition continues today: Fu Rao now teaches in Prof. Sery’s studio at the art academy, where discussions among his students remain lively.

Fu Rao, Meal Senate, 2010. Fu Rao, Mahlzeit, 2009. He sees his artistic career as having three phases. The first was his “Brown Period,” which began when he arrived in Germany. As the name suggests, the paintings were largely monochromatic brown, revealing an expressive approach to Eastern landscape.

“The material I used at the time was asphalt, the material normally used to pave roads. It lies between water-based and oil-based media, and it also reflected that initial period after my arrival in Europe—the product of a collision between two cultural identities, Chinese and Western,” Fu Rao said. Fu Rao, Family Meeting, 2017. Fu Rao, Family Kessler, 2016. The second phase began around 2011, roughly 10 years after the artist arrived in Germany.

He began exploring the subtle relationships among groups of figures and the language of color. The formerly monochromatic surfaces gradually began to show points of color; the paintings became lighter and freer, with a dreamlike quality. Figures often appear within expansive landscapes, alongside finely rendered sections and details. His “Family” series is the most representative example. Installation view of Fu Rao’s first museum exhibition, “Hybrid,” Dresden City Art Museum, 2016. Fu Rao, Follow Wind, 2014. During this same period, Fu Rao began to emerge in Germany’s art world, and the Dresden City Art Museum permanently acquired one work from his Follow Wind series.

Even then, however, he had not freed himself from his fascination with asphalt. Oil paint mixed with asphalt suggested an artist wavering between two identities. Fu Rao giving a tour at an exhibition in Dresden. Fu Rao, Fishing Lights, 2024. The third phase is his current work: a complete expression and release of his inner life. The colors are exuberant, bold, and seductive, and the immense dramatic tension they contain can feel almost vortex-like, drawing viewers into the image and toward the artist’s innermost self.

“This recent period feels like an explosion. I want to break free from all the constraints imposed on me by materials and identity, and express myself through the purest, strongest colors,” Fu Rao said of his current state of painting. Installation view of Fu Rao: “The Color of the Soul,” Perrotin Shanghai, 2024. Fu Rao, Baroque Fantasy, 2024. “I would describe myself as a sapling that grew for 20 years in the soil of Eastern culture, was transplanted into Western soil, and grew there for another 20 years.”

Now, he said with a smile, he no longer dwells on what is supposedly “Eastern” or “Western.” “After more than 20 years, if I were still struggling with some question of cultural identity between the two, that would be too painful.” Fu Rao with his daughter in the studio. Fu Rao’s Skiers series, exhibited by Perrotin at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024, was inspired by skiing with his children and captured moments from those outings. Fu Rao came to Germany in 2001, met his wife at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, and eventually settled there, establishing a family.

Now, nearly every weekend, he and his wife and children go into nature for an outing—to relax, restore themselves, and look for inspiration.

“Sometimes I spend time with my children, or see a group of children playing along the Elbe, or a group of young women picnicking beneath a tree. All of these things become sources for my work,” Fu Rao told us. His paintings often contain images of his children’s everyday lives: skiing, playing soccer, climbing mountains, playing in the woods, sitting at home and drawing. In Dresden’s natural surroundings, he sometimes hikes with German friends, reflecting in nature and accumulating energy, then pours that stored energy into the studio.

“Dresden is a very good place to work. It is quiet and very close to nature. I can enter my own interior and have a dialogue with myself.” Fu Rao values this environment, which also has much to do with his love of reading Eastern and Western philosophy. The peace and calm around him make it easier to develop his own system of thought.

“I have read a great deal of Kant, as well as Schopenhauer’s writings on aesthetics. They are important nourishment for an artist; they make my entire theoretical system more complete. They are also like a lighthouse, showing me the direction in which to continue working.” Fu Rao in his studio. His paintings often take the form of triptychs, are enormous in scale, and carry grand narratives. His life, by contrast, is simple, pure, and orderly.

“Basically, the radius of my weekday life is limited to my family and studio. I usually start in the studio at 9 a.m., take a one-hour break, then work until 6 p.m. before ‘clocking out’ and going home.” Fu Rao preparing a study for a work. Occasionally, his two children come to “visit” him at the studio. Seeing his paintings, they mischievously draw on them with brushes and ask their artist father many questions.

“They ask, ‘Dad, why are the people you paint like that? Why do you paint such scary figures? Why don’t you paint cartoons?’” Fu Rao said, laughing as he imitated their voices. “I tell them that the world contains both comedy and tragedy. Comedy brings people joy, while tragedy makes them think. No one can do without either one.” Fu Rao with his family in a Dresden museum. Fu Rao and exhibition guests admiring the Dresden night view from a boat. Living in Dresden, a traditional historic city with a deep inheritance of classical music and art, Fu Rao says he continually draws nourishment from sources beyond painting.

“There is a very good opera house here. What I most enjoy attending are concerts of Gustav Mahler’s music performed by the Dresden Philharmonic. I also most like listening to Mahler while I work. His epic, expansive symphonies—so concerned with life and death—make it especially easy to enter the emotional state of creation.”

“My ideal is to be an artist of the world, a sincere artist, because only sincere art can move people.” Image courtesy of Perrotin and the artist. Exhibition photography by Bao Mengqi.