Oxymoron—At the Moment of Lu Zheng-yuan’s Solo Exhibition
at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei
Fan Dian
Firstly, I offer my sincere congratulations to Mr. Lu Zheng-yuan for the opening of his solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Taipei, and express my special gratitude to Director J.J. Shih for supporting and placing great importance on this exhibition. The art circles in Taiwan and China have been maintaining close association and interaction and the development of contemporary art on both sides of the Strait has allowed my fellow artists to share their artistic concept and language and to benefit from each other’s achievements, enriching our thinking and understanding of the evolving contemporary art.
Lu’s solo exhibition represents a new achievement for the exchange of contemporary art between Taiwan and China. For many years, MOCA, Taipei has played an integral part in advocating the development of new art, especially in promoting new artistic concepts, media, and forms, nurturing the awareness of visual cultural innovativeness for the art circle and the public.
As a young artist from the Chinese art circle, Lu has shown two obvious attributes in his artistic practice. First of all, he represents the group of artists who grew up in and have been maturing in a new cultural context of globalization and the information era after the beginning of the 21st century. He demonstrates a fearless spirit of exploration and creativeness. His full attention to the development of contemporary art started when he was a student of sculpture at China Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Since then, he has been devotedly endeavoring in learning to inherit the traditional language and forms of the sculptural art. On the other hand, he has also been working on how to integrate the tradition of sculpture with the contemporary spirit as well as the contemporary forms of sculpture. Therefore, among the new generation of sculptors, he displays clearly a sense of bravery in transcending the tradition, overcoming existing limits, and continuously venturing into the new territory.
In my opinion, Lu is an artist who values thinking more than speaking. He has a strong inner power, a concentrating energy originating from his inner spirit and force that has been driving his artistic inspiration and unrelenting exploration throughout these years. China’s entire socio-economic development, especially its cultural development, has formed a cultural site infused with energy and Lu’s incredible creative aspiration has fully embodied this energy.
The second attribute is Lu’s unique insight in his exploration of the contemporary artistic form. He is extremely attentive to the reality of the everyday life, and can perceptively comprehend those peripheral edges or things that defy simple definition. His attention to this allows him to conceptually steer through the space between the realms of art and life experience. Meanwhile, he is particularly interested in material transformation, and thus, has utilized different media and techniques in his large amount of works. Material
structures our living environment; for Lu, the comprehension of material is not only related to material characteristics, but also pertinent to their cultural or social characteristics. On the one hand, he has been working on transforming the social characteristics of material on a conceptual level. On the other hand, he has also been transforming the natural characteristics of material on a visual level. Such transformation frees his artworks from the original material characteristics and allows them to surface as fresh and unfamiliar “oxymorons.”
The term, “oxymoron,” appropriately expresses Lu’s artistic characteristics. To achieve the transformation of material and alternation of forms, he has tried and experimented extensively. For instance, in terms of using black marble for sculptures, he has created a massive quantity of works that are related to the public’s life experience, which simultaneously differ from the everyday living experience. These sculptures present a kind of visual illusion, providing a new angle for people and introducing a new artistic experience, especially when they are placed in the public space. Therefore, Lu’s reverse thinking on the material characteristics in his art, particularly his outstanding sculptural skill that has highlighted the previously neglected value of the material, are extremely intriguing for me.
Lu is a trained sculptor, but his work has greatly reached beyond the domain of sculpture. One could also say that he departs from sculpture and extends his practice into an integrated expression of painting, installation, video, and has more truthfully reflected the choices and exploratory
direction of a younger generation of Chinese artists in the 21st century after entering an era of images and media. Lu has worked with extensive kinds of art and media; nonetheless, whether it is painting, installation, sculpture, or video, what he actually cares about is the similarity and differences between things. In other words, he attempts to transform an ordinary experience that people are familiar with into a de-familiarized one. As a result, his work could be a simple image or a scene; it might be in tangible, physical form, and it might be abstract. He has thoroughly reflected upon the possibilities of things and broadly explored the de- familiarization of their forms. On a certain level, his approach corresponds to the typical traits of our life, and to the cultural traits, in particular.
We have acquired a lot of experiences about things we know. However, we still need to face the unknown world of the future. Lu has been steadfastly conducting a constructive work in finding an artistic way to express what lies in between the everyday experience and the indescribable sensibility. He is intoxicated with the transformation of different materials, using them to construct an “oxymoronic” relation between objects, between people and objects, and between subjective motivation and objective reality. Manifested in this utterly dramatic investigation are his persistence and his artistic courage to moving towards the deep end.
I sincerely congratulate Mr. Lu for his exhibition in Taipei, and hope that the exhibition will capture the attention of more fellow artists and initiate more exchanges as well as be very well-received by the Taiwanese audience.