In Forest Fire-taking, Xue Ruozhe extends his persistent inquiry into duplication and psychological space. Two near-identical figures confront one another within the same frame, differentiated only by subtle micro-gestures. “Gray within gray,” “cold within cold”: the layers of color make the ground and the bodies indistinguishable, allowing figure and background to dissolve into each other. The space exists, yet appears to be in retreat—turning into a “non-place” that carries no identifiable cultural coordinates.
This image is not a narrative moment but a psychological one. The gestures are minute: the tilt of the torso, the suspension of hands, the silent friction between two almost identical selves. They seem to be about to “strike fire in the forest”—to undertake something potentially dangerous in a site that is dark, moist, and arguably not even suitable for ignition. Almost nothing is happening, yet disaster is possible. What we see is not a depiction of reality, but the adjacency of psychic vectors. The canvas is “concretely empty”: no surplus detail, no literary ornament. The figure here is not a specific person, but a vessel of consciousness. In a fictional theatrical foreground, the “about to happen” is held in permanent suspension.
Here, Xue uses the extreme material specificity of representational oil painting to articulate a threshold of psychic suspension—a point where danger and instability become unusually palpable precisely because the visual structure is hyper-stable.
It is both present and already fading.