Xue Ruozhe

Xue Ruozhe was born in Jiangsu Province. After graduating from the Oil Painting Department of China Central Academy of Fine Arts, he continued his studies in the Painting Programme of the Royal College of Art, and obtained his master's degree in 2015. He was the winner of the Neville Burston Prize, Gordon Luton Prize for Fine Art, and the Tom Bendheim Prize, also the recipient of China National Scholarship. He was shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2022. Xue currently lives and works in Beijing and Guangzhou. Using painting as his main artistic approach, Xue's works explore the re-contextualization and re-enchantment of figurative painting in contemporary media ecology, in the rift between painting and imagery, painting and its own history. Underneath the restrained pictorial narrative are Xue's hints about what has yet to be presented or is about to happen. Working with a highly restricted methodology, Xue pushes the psychological density of his paintings to the limit, the reality is then distorted by constant subtraction until the paintings reach a state of suspension and stagnation. In recent years, his works have focused on exploring the boundary of reality.