Xue Ruozhe

Moving between the thresholds of reality and the surreal, Xue Ruozhe’s practice situates the figure as a vessel—precise in structure yet emptied of narration. With an austere palette and a cool, frontal compositional logic, Xue removes the immediate identifiers of face, identity, gender, and narrative. In his lexicon, the “back view,” the “duplicated subject,” and “micro gestures” become the primary generators of psychological tension. Portraiture, for him, is not dependent on a face: a tiny change of posture, a tilt of the hand, is enough to reveal a state of mind.
How can a highly concrete system of figuration produce uncertainty, delay, suspension? This is the central proposition in Xue’s painting. What appears minimal never collapses into formalism; instead, the internal engineering of color adjacency, brushwork, and spatial overlap constructs a psychological space—an “almost-happening” zone between presence and disappearance. His paintings are not scenes; they are conditions of mind.