Graduating in 2021, Swann Ronné is the 2023 winner of the 1st edition of the Zao Wou-Ki Foundation scholarship, the result of a partnership with the Beaux-Arts de Paris, which consists of the award of 4 scholarships a year, intended to promote the artistic careers of French and Chinese students and graduates of the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the China Academy in Hangzhou.

This financial support enabled him to carry out a post-graduate project consisting of a 10-month residency and an exhibition at the Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art in Chongqing, a fast-developing Chinese megalopolis.

This exhibition in Chongqing is all the more symbolic as this city had a very great importance in the career of Zao Wou-Ki. It was the city in which the Kuomintang government as well as all the Chinese academies and the Foreign institutions retreated, facing the Japanese invasion. The Hangzhou School of Fine Arts moved there in 1941, after a long wandering in central China. Zao Wou-Ki even presented a personal exhibition in Chongqing in 1945.

Swann Ronné’s painting is based on a system of montage and slippage between gesture and language. This approach is governed by an eye that feeds on urban visual environments, transforming graphic elements and visual sensations into a new language.

These excellent working conditions have enabled the young French painter to produce new works in monumental format. They will be on view in 600m² of gallery space during his solo exhibition I Just Need A Sign / 我只要一个符号 from 27 July to 26 October 2024. 

The creation of these scholarships between the School of Fine Arts in Hangzhou and Beaux-Arts de Paris wished to be inspired by Zao Wou-Ki’s journey and to perpetuate the artist’s conviction that the knowledge of other traditions and the experience of past centuries were necessary to find one’s own way.

Practical Info:
from Tuesday to Sunday – 10h/18h
Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art 
1-F2 Block 3, Star Fest, Huangshan Street, Liangjiang New District, Chongqing