Dialogue Space Gallery is pleased to announce Ru Xiaofan 2011 New Work Solo Exhibition Inspire · Expire, his first solo exhibition at local gallery in China. Previously he had two solo exhibitions in China, includes the Shanghai Museum (2005) and Today Art Museum (2009).

This “realistic turn” suggests a new direction in Ru Xiafan’s work. Hou Hanru comments: “He tends to mingle bright colours with grey layers while resorting the technique of liquidating pigments and free brushworks in order to generate scenes of ambiguity and chaos. This tendency is further enforced by his recent decisions to transform the surfaces of his paintings into collages of diverse scenes – often contrasting each other in terms of contents and forms: one can witness clashes of different spaces and times that bring together gardens, flowers, beaches, war zones, trash, etc. together.

The exhibition entitled Inspire· Expire, Lao Zhu said: “Inspiration was a necessity for him to escape, we know deeply that he has evolved over a very long process from realism to surrealism. Expiration is the expression of his mental maturity; one painting has already left the world, and because it is a world of its own, a world in which what counts is not the existence of things, but the fact that the things in the painting can grow by themselves. How to transform a painting from the imitation of existence to existence itself? Would it be a perpetuation of the artistic inspiration nurtured in this ancient capital south of the Yangtze River? This is probably the reason why we want to trace the changes in Ru Xiaofan’s style.”

Ru Xiaofan was born in Nan Jing. After graduation from the Fine Arts Department of the Nan Jing Normal University, he moved to France and continued his study in the National Superior School of Fine Arts in Paris. He had received the scholarship twice from the La Casa Velasquez in Madrid. In 2004, he was included in the Larousse Encyclopedia of Contemporary Art. He currently Lives and works in Paris.