16/05/2026
The exhibition Aurora will, for the first time, present together the eight completed works (of a planned ten) from Rao Fu’s “Decalogy” series, which he began in 2016. These monumental triptychs, each over four meters wide, construct a “film to be viewed in the round,” recording countless trajectories of life and spiritual landscapes, and profoundly showcasing the artist’s unique exploration of the folds of Eastern and Western cultures.
The opening works, Light Year (2019) and Loosed String (2019), establish the spiritual tone of the “Decalogy.” The former, as Rao Fu describes it, is a beam of light “that has passed through my body, straight toward the firmament,” pointing to a pure existence that transcends time, space, culture, and national borders. The latter is like a horizon torn apart by tension, overlapping the individual experience of departure with the historical collisions of our era, marking a shift from being “enveloped by the landscape” to “constructing meaning through the landscape.”
The subsequent works, Abyss I (2020) and Abyss II (2022), are not traditional landscapes but “mental topographies” layered from memory, imagination, and history. With wild brushstrokes, antagonistic colors, and profound fissures, they present the individual’s loss and reflection within grand historical narratives, echoing the German Romantic tradition of Friedrich’s “contemplation of the back-turned figure.”
Legend (2021) uses the whale as a metaphor for his own state of drift and his longing for cross-cultural freedom, while The Sound of Wind (2022) condenses the trauma of migration and the complex tensions of global ethics beneath a deceptively calm seascape. His latest work, Mirage (2023), responds to the historical metaphor of contemporary global migration through a mythologized ocean, and The Night Banquet (2023) constructs a spiritual ritual amidst chaos, with giants holding sacred objects and night-walkers, like Dionysian priests awakening humanity’s yearning for clarity in the darkness.
Rao FU .art ：Aurora
Dates: March 21– June 21, 2026
