YYYY-MM-DD: Xue Ruozhe Solo Exhibition

Throughout his career, Xue Ruozhe has been following and exploring an elusive fissure on
the finite surface of the canvas, wandering at the intersection of images and the world. A
fissure which also indicates the fine line between fiction and reality, blurring its shape over
time, deep as a mineral vein, and light as a breath. It is often imperceptible and is no
different from the various appearances of things in life, such as a back scene of two women
or a waving hand. But as the brush continues to move, and as the brushstrokes begin to
overlap, echo, wander and deviate, the outline of something uncertain, unpredictable,
difficult to detect, or even non-existent gradually slowly emerges. For Xue Ruozhe, painting
therefore involves a deep entanglement of seeing and understanding, and of the real and
the virtual. It plays the entrance from the realm of the visible to the invisible world. When
the brush continues to move across the image, it is like sunlight moving past the surface of
the Earth, lurking in the smallest angular shift, the upcoming, largest shadow.

Sunlight leaves traces on the canvas, defining the figures and colours, and weaving the
artist‘s constantly passing life into the plane of painting, silently measuring time. In this
series named “YYYY-MM-DD”, the rotation of distant celestial bodies and their almost
invisible trajectories are preserved and revealed through the withering and blossoming of a
flower: every day, at about the same time, behind the same vase of flowers, Xue Ruozhe sets
up a canvas, blends the colours, paint one of the flowers, then date this flower. One flower
a day until all are painted. Time passes, the flowers in the bottle are constantly changing,
the buds bloom, and the flowers wither. Xue Ruozhe records their changes with paints,
leaving the previously painted ones intact and not covered. After finishing a bottle of
flowers, he would put a bunch of fresh flowers into the bottle, and so on and so forth, day
after day. In order not to interrupt this continuous action, he set the size of the picture at 50
x 40 cm, which happens to fit in his suitcase and be carried around, migrating with him
from place to place. From the birth date of Xue Ruozhe's youngest daughter,

'YYYY-MM-DD' series will continue until the end of the artist's life.

In this way, Xue Ruozhe attempts to explore what is the most fundamental and authentic
relationship between painting and life, how life draws its own yet-to-be formed contours on
the inner plane of painting, and how those things that have faded away over time once
again emerge from the gaps in the canvas. In the continuous cycle of 'YYYY-MM-DD',
which is like daily routine, the practice of painting becomes the anchor of the artist's life. It
folds the most tangible life processes, flesh and breath, into a repeating sequence of
painting that unfolds slowly like a fan. Through these simple, barely emotional and
allegorical flower paintings, Xue Ruozhe seems to be marking his own life, just like we tear
off a page of calendar or write a page of diary every day, only in the painter's most
instinctive and essential way; However, each day that has passed, every page on the diary
that is about to be turn over and each calendar page that was about to be torn down, was
almost effortlessly pressed into the same image space. As time layers overlapped and piled
up, the finite surface of the canvas thus reveals its otherwise invisible depth. In this way, it
seems Xue Ruozhe wants to tell us that time is not something external to painting. It has
actually been lurking at the hinge between image and image, images and canvases, the
deep gap that leads to the invisible world. The artist's work is to explore this overlapping,
wandering, and uncertain boundary zone, allowing us to glimpse the original shape of life
in the deepest places.