Exhibition
27th December 2021 – 28th February 2022
Venue
SGA Chengdu, no.2 Building 29, Tianfu Changdao, 16 Shengtong Street, Gaoxin District, Chengdu, China.
Artist
Luo MIn
Academic Moderator
He Guiyan
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Tracing Aesthetics Through Expression
- Recent works of Luo Min
Artist Luo Min engages herself in mostly realistic subjects in her early works, emphasizing themes and narratives in predominantly figurative language. However, her recent works highlight a shift in her practice. Her concern of external reality evolves to express her innate emotions; the emphasis on subject matter moves toward the everyday nature of painting; her descriptive literary style transforms to an expressive inscription. The appearance of subjects such as flowers, birds, and plants in her series “Amid Flowers” and “A Journey to Spring” shows wane in her focus on realism. Bird-and-flower is a well-established genre in traditional Chinese painting that embodies the oriental aesthetic appeal during the classical period. Luo Min certainly holds the subject in a privileged place, depicting plums, orchids, bamboo, and chrysanthemums in her painting for their symbolic oriental representation of nature and strong literati qualities.
This shift in subject matter and artistic language occurs almost simultaneously for the artist. Using a hybrid approach of reinterpretation, realism, abstraction and expressiveness, her portrayal of flower and plant pays homage to the conventional aesthetic appeal in Western painting as well as the charm of traditional Chinese painting. Her artistic language is fluid. It alternates between traditional and contemporary, the West and the East, the figurative and the symbolic, yet pays mutual reference and reinforces the other at the same time. Undoubtedly, each decision marks a difference in technique and dictates the overall sensibility of the canvas. In Luo Min's latest works, viewers could trace the heaviness of brushwork and the textural quality of the oil medium. Furthermore, the paintings are charged with ink wisps that resemble the 'feibai' technique in Chinese painting and lyrical linework. Altogether, these new works add a more significant focus on the poetics of expressiveness and the manifestation of imagery-- the sweeping brushwork lunges towards us as sincere reflections from the heart. It harnesses her attempt to reinterpret traditional painting and visual motifs through a contemporary stylistic expression, and her assertion on the return of classic oriental view of aesthetics.
Luo Min also reveals an attention toward conceptual expression in her other series, notably in "Memories of Southern Sichuan" series, which consists works that are collaged in colour blocks and images. The colour blocks appear to render the overall pictorial composition and create a variety of visual areas. While the images allude to an individual's memories or personal life experiences, each seemingly has the capacity to freeze time into a frame. Conceptualisation resides in the visual language becomes an aesthetic trail, acting both as a visual cue and disruption to narrative coherence. The conceptualisation and shift in Luo Min's artistic language derived from the change in her creative pursuit. Luo Min seeks to knead tradition with contemporary qualities in terms of visual language and technical expression, minimise the socio-narrative aspect to focus on the painterly. This stance is also a desire to return painterliness to its fundamentals, i.e., painting for what it essentially is. In this way, painting is like practising Zen; if language is stripped away, painting becomes an entirely personal act. Through her series "Amid Flowers", "Memories of Southern Sichuan," and "Heart Sutra," Luo Min continues the dialogue of nature, life, and self, thereby transcending the essence of painting. While most of the works in this exhibition comprise small paper works, they coalesce to form a mass. Just as all creation process begins from a single point, they draw us into a closer experience of the artist's everchanging language and creative trajectory.
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About the artist
Luo Min (b.1968, Sichuan, China)
Graduated from the China Southwest Normal University, and received MA from the People's Liberation Army Academy of Art. Luo Min is a first-class national artist, a committee member of the China Oil Painting Society, and a professional painter at the Beijing Fine Art Academy. She has held exhibitions across Asia and Europe. Currently lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu, China.
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