Comment on LuZhengYuan
-- By Mick（Italian curator、art critic）
… That’s the style of Lu Zhengyuan’s oil painting: intense and shocking. His exquisite painting techniques could present hyperrealism perfectly and also exceed all aesthetic elements to express the fundamental concepts of his art creation. In the artist’s ideas, reality itself doesn’t really exist. It is simply the media of the artist. As what Ferdinand de Saussure noted in semeiology, or what Umberto Eco said, “to present something else with these”.
… The creation of Lu, though expressed with great difference, persists in the concept. The artist works in this way: he starts with an idea, perhaps a detail of a specific object, or a picture, or a stretch of history or anecdote in our cultural heritage; then he exerts these as a way to express mood, feelings and emotions, which might not be related to their origins. The realistic concrete world doesn’t exist, so we should not perceive them on the basis of history and culture.
… Lu pays close attention to individual psychology, the artist’s personal perception. His artworks convey his pure emotion concealed in his heart, or the unconscious mentality and feeling, or his sensibility and savvy. Here are life experience, trauma, cultural concepts and the images of dreams, but out of time and space and the custom, they come from the most private domain of his heart. Reality and culture is merely the intermediate stage of knowledge and if we can exceed it, we will arrive at the ultimate stage of knowledge: to perceive the world unconsciously. Art is the one and only way to express this level of cognition. In Lu’s artworks, artistic expression is deliberately placed on the dialectic aspect with reality…
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Being separated from reality and dealt with great care, focusing more on individual perception, these are the common elements in the new generation of Chinese artists’ art. They emphasize individuality and use more conceptualized way of creation. From a Marxist’s point of view, art is always relative, depending on the social economic structure; on this premise we can understand why young artists working in 2010 can represent the epoch of art. The theme of the new artists is no longer society and collectivity. For the first time, this generation realizes the importance of themselves and their individuality, and they dialectically emphasize the importance of individuality instead of collectivity. We are living in a “post-modern renaissance” era, in fashionable and practical words, it’s the revolution of thought. Gradually, without yelling or hurts, the characteristics of art practice are slowly changing and so is culture.