Xiao Fan Ru at White Box

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Jonathan Goodman

The Chinese painter Xiao Fan Ru, born in Nankin, emigrated to Paris in 1983. A midcareer artist, he is of the same generation as the conceptual and installation triumvirate who have done so well in America: Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang and Gu Wenda. Unlike them, however, Xiao Fan continues to work with the traditional medium of paint. His recent show, titled "Bubblegame," offered a series of crowded, pastel-colored works whose busy surfaces suggest, among other things, erotic profusion. The 10 mostly midsize paintings (all 2003) that were on view are filled with candy-colored tubules, condomlike balloons, female faces and children's toys, such as stuffed bears. The complicated array of imagery suggests hybridizations whose extravagant forms seem related to genetic mutation, but they are also dramatic instances of an artist at play, given over to creating a wondrous world of his own.

Bubblegame #10 features a forest of balloons. In the upper central area is a joker figure a trickster whose red-lipped grin betokens some undefined menace. Beneath him are three figures with their backs to the viewer: a boy in gray clothes and a girl in a red dress stand on either side of a burly figure wearing a gray shirt and black pants. Presumably a father and his two children, they conjure an image of safety and protection--the girl holds her father's hand--as they seem to tentatively navigate the intricate fantasy world that faces them.

Bubblegame #17 continues Xiao Fan's penchant for a surface bursting with a cornucopia of disparate elements. It contains the face of a teddy bear, a small nude boy with a sway back and bulging belly, the glamorous head of a woman in sunglasses, and some cartoon figures in a matrix of pink tubules and pale purple bubbles. Xiao Fan's vividly imagined world, painted with confidence and rife with associations, conveys pleasure through both subject and medium.