4me4you features “ xue ruozhe: chronoscape”.

A cornerstone of Xue’s Chronoscape is the artist’s ongoing series YYYY-MM-DD, where Xue paints a single flower every day, beginning on the day their youngest daughter was born. Each flower is marked with the date, creating a visual record of time’s passage. This daily ritual has become a lifelong practice, a meditation on the transitory nature of both the subject and the artist’s own experience.
The flowers, in their quiet simplicity, reflect the constant flow of time, and through their repetitive yet unique presence, Xue offers a profound exploration of how we relate to the moments that make up our lives. This ritual, though intimate, extends beyond the personal to speak to broader themes of endurance, memory, and the human need to mark time in an ever-accelerating world. In this sense, YYYY-MM-DD offers a quiet counterpoint to the rush of contemporary life, creating a space for reflection and resilience in the face of uncertainty.

Xue’s work also reflects on the very processes of making art, often folding self-referential layers into the work. In the My Studio-based Practice series, for instance, a bouquet of orange lilies from YYYY-MM-DD reappears in a minimalist studio setting. Here, a young woman in black paints at her canvas, but in the painting before her, the lilies have already withered—creating a temporal disjunction that reflects the cyclical nature of life and art. This recursive approach to time and space creates a layered, intertextual dialogue between the artist’s past and present works, offering the viewer an invitation to explore the complex ways in which time and memory shape both the artist and their art.
In works such as The Misplaced Studio, Xue delves even further into the concept of time, space, and the relationship between artist, model, and image. In this painting, three identical figures exist in slightly distorted, disjointed spaces, connected by painted tape in a trompe l’oeil effect.

A translucent white cloth, often used in studio settings to establish a scene, becomes a veil that obscures the figure behind it, alluding to the ancient Greek myth of the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. In this myth, Zeuxis creates grapes so lifelike that birds attempt to eat them, only for him to realize that the curtain concealing Parrhasius’s painting is itself part of the artwork. In The Misplaced Studio, the veil functions as a metaphor for the illusionary nature of art and space, where time and reality are rendered fluid, ambiguous, and unstable.

Through these works, Xue continues to push the boundaries of painting, interrogating its relationship to time, identity, and the act of creation itself. Their art is a testament to the quiet, ongoing negotiation between past and present, self and other, and the complex, often elusive nature of existence.

In Chronoscape, time is not just a theme but the very medium through which the work is created, woven into every brushstroke, every layer of paint. As the viewer moves through the exhibition, they are invited to contemplate not only the artwork but the passage of time itself, and the profound ways in which art can reflect, embody, and transform that passage into a visual language all its own.

Artist: Ruozhe Xue

Gallery Rosenfeld