START Museum is please to present artist Fu Site’s solo exhibition “Figures” on May 19th, 2024. Fu Site (b. 1984) is one of the most representative one among the emerging young generation painting artists in recent years. This exhibition will showcase nearly 20 new pieces of works by the artist, all revolving around the theme “Figures”, representing his latest exploration of painting and imagery. The exhibition will continue until July 7th.

Fu Site was born in Liaoning Province. After graduating from the Department of Painting at Academy of Arts & Design，Tsinghua University in 2006, he went to France for further studies and has been living there ever since. Fu Site belongs to the peak of Chinese artists traveling to France in the 21st century. His continuous focus and dedication to exploring the language of painting seems to set his art apart from the mainstream contemporary art in France, which is characterized by strong conceptualism and criticism. This has led to his creation of a more pure and introspective creative logic, deconstructing, analyzing, and reconstructing classical and contemporary visual elements in a depth dimensional manner. Evolving from early realism and narrative styles to his current expression through what he terms “organic abstraction,” Fu Site has achieved a profound understanding of the intrinsic tension and dynamics within “things” through repeated self-renewal.

In “Fu Site: Figures” the artist further evolves his painting experiments by focusing on “Figures”, attempting to directly respond to one of the most core and eternal themes in the history of human painting. For Fu Site, shaping an image is not the focus of his attention. He perceives the essence of the entire society, life, and even the universe as a vast and complex system of movement – where all non-nothingness interactions create a dynamic chain mechanism, and within this fluidity, development, and interactivity lies the core of the artist’s true focus. “An image does not seem to maintain its appearance, it is a portrait of a moment in the process, a dynamic system in motion,” says the artist. With this as a starting point, Fu Site presents his expression of “Figures” throughout the entire exhibition: they are both solid and in motion, momentary yet eternal, discrete yet aggregated, definite yet directionless. Here, Fu Site attempts to propose the possibility of a “non-portrait,” using imagery to embody a mechanism of internal movement, an intuitive yet traceable creation.