Dancer 2
候车 Waiting for the Train
纸本铅笔 Pencil on Paper
2003-2006
候车 Waiting for the Train
纸本铅笔 Pencil on Paper
候车 Waiting for the Train
纸本铅笔 Pencil on Paper
候车 Waiting for the Train
纸本铅笔 Pencil on Paper
候车 Waiting for the Train
纸本铅笔 Pencil on Paper
2003-2006
2019
2019
碗 Bowl
布面油画 Oil on Canvas
120 x 200 cm
驴子 Donkey
布面油画 Oil on Canvas
235 x 145cm
2021
2022
Lu Hang: I and You
01
In Paris, Lu Hang often goes to the Louvre. Sometimes, he goes just for one piece of art, watching it for two hours, three hours, or even half a day. As the viewing continues and deepens, as Hesse describes reading, some wonderful things happen:
At first, they thought it was a beautiful garden for children, with beds woven with tulips and golden ponds, but now this garden has become a park, a landscape, a part of the earth. This world, with its heavenly ivory coast, is full of enticing ecstasy and constantly refreshing petals. And, what looked like a garden, park, or tropical jungle yesterday, today and tomorrow, it looks more like a temple, with thousands of halls and courtyards, the spiritual wealth of all nations and ages, all waiting to be awakened, forming a polyphonic chorus.
The constantly overlapping and expanding richness makes the psychological feeling brought by this viewing mode, rather than being visual, closer to the nature of hearing. Viewing based on listening transforms the psychological relationship between people and works from “I and it” to “I and you”, which is a face-to-face, direct, and intimate relationship. It is “I” meeting “you” with all my existence, it is a kind of communication and symbiosis.
Philosopher Martin Buber said in his most important work “I and Thou” that whether a person perceives the outside world as “you” or “it” is a fundamental question. He believes that “I and it” reflects an experiential world, while “I and you” shapes a relational world.
At present, when we say that we are face to face with a person, it also implies that we will face the information and news that this person receives every moment, every minute, every second from various social accounts, media, entertainment platforms, etc. Such a situation makes a person’s real face-to-face with another person (whether in reality or psychologically) a scarce and luxurious thing. You will feel the panic and uncertainty that the person opposite is about to get up and leave at any time, the temptation and threat of another time and space looms between the dialoguers, leaving at any time has gradually become a tacit understanding, everyone seems to “live elsewhere”.
Face to face with Lu Hang, he often asks a question after finishing his own statement, “So, what do you think?”, “Do you think so too?”, “What is your feeling?”. When you get used to Lu Hang’s way of communication, you will understand that he is not a one-way outputter who tilts the right to speak towards himself, but a participatory co-builder who brings all of himself and tries to explore all of others. He seems to be a person who sits eternally on the opposite chair.
Face and listen, regardless of cost, to art, others, and the entire external world. Time shows a lag on Lu Hang. He seems to have just come from 20 or 30 years ago, not having experienced the rapid acceleration of the times, thus giving people a long-lost sense of classical faith and enthusiasm.
Lu Hang regards the artist’s constantly developing life as the most important work, which is his cognition, feeling, expression, and creation; and each specific work only carries the mark of different stages. If Lu Hang’s experience and his works are juxtaposed, it will be found that his stage-by-stage confusion, thinking, collapse, and reconstruction process is one after another active participation in the external world, the expansion and deepening of the psychological perspective relationship of “I and you”. “Human” and “human nature” have become the meta-propositions that Lu Hang and his works always ask and explore.
02
In 1987, Lu Hang was born in Beijing. When talking about the influence of his family, he believes that his parents’ laissez-faire education played a key role.
From the beginning of middle school, when his peers were living a simple life between school and home, he was suddenly “thrown” into a reality with a very rich grayscale - to go to Beijing Railway Station for sketching, and to follow reporters to various parts of the country for investigation and interview.
These two important experiences constituted Lu Hang’s understanding of the concept of “viewing” in art. He believes that viewing not only includes the two meanings of “seeing” and “listening”, but also requires seeing the hidden side of things.
Starting from high school and lasting for four years, Lu Hang went to Beijing Railway Station to draw quick sketches three to four days a week. This was his father’s suggestion and also a tradition of Chinese art students. There, he saw people of all shapes and faces.
A mother lost her wallet, along with her household registration book and ID card, and cried at the entrance of the railway station holding her young child. She was disheveled and distraught, and when she cried to the extreme, a kind of resolute dignity was born in her expression. The police gave her money, and she said softly, what’s the use of this money?
A shy monk, at first did not want to be painted by strangers. When he learned that Lu Hang was a middle school student and painting was for practicing skills, and he could go to the Academy of Fine Arts when he practiced well, he said, then you paint.
A thief, because he often met with Lu Hang, skipped him when he started: I’ll find the next one.
In the chase of being driven away with a group of homeless people, a sentence floated from behind: You stinky painter!
When painting a child’s sweet sleep in the noisy waiting hall, he was moved to the point where he couldn’t help but look again and again, and for the first time felt the greed of vision and the meaning of painting.
He followed the reporters to sites such as AIDS villages, conversion of farmland into forests, and mining accidents, etc.
Sitting in a rich man’s luxury car, listening to his blueprint to change the world, outside the car window, he saw a hunched old man pushing a small cart full of cardboard boxes and waste paper for selling scrap, slowly passing by.
In the drilling team, he encountered a blowout accident. The workers filled the well leak while cursing the quality of the stone powder. When he came up from the mine, his whole body and the stone powder merged into one color.
During an interview, their car was nervously rushing on the dangerous mountain road all day. In the heat, he squatted under the tree with the reporters and ate the sweetest watermelon ever…
These experiences subtly made Lu Hang interested in this world and in people. When the successful ones are singing, he also feels that those ordinary people who have not been recorded in history are also humming their own songs of joy and sorrow. Death, blood and tears, despair, crying, numbness, smiles, behind each face, there is an indescribable fate. People and the world form a more complex and contradictory deep feeling in Lu Hang’s heart.
If you can’t see others, the world will present a smooth and hazy appearance. Once you touch the shocking moments in the fate of others, the texture and roughness of the world will come out. As a teenager, painting made Lu Hang feel that he had established a dividing line with the people around him, giving him a sense of identity that was unique to him. After seeing so much of the world, Lu Hang felt that he was no different from everyone else, and he quietly erased that dividing line psychologically. Essentially, he believes that he is one with everyone, and there is no difference between people in his heart. Living here and living there does not have an essential superiority. From the dimension of human history, the times are changing, but people seem to be experiencing similar fates over and over again.
This destined Lu Hang’s creative path and direction. He is interested in everything from the origin of people to their final departure, and is fascinated by the folds and depths of human nature. His vigorous curiosity and desire to explore make him not only want to reach the peak, but also want to sink into the deep sea. His works have no hesitation or evasion in exploring human nature, and they exhaustively depict the bleak bottom color of human nature. Among them, there is a kind of hot-blooded bravery and fearlessness, as well as a broader sense of sadness and compassion.
This is Lu Hang’s fundamental thinking and answer to “why I paint”.
03
Lu Hang’s creative output is quite large, and behind each genre and style, there is a research system that revolves around it. Under the support of this rigorous creative logic, his works, whether from the content extension of a single genre or the ideological expansion across genres, form an internal logical connection and echo. The formation of this creative thinking is the most important thinking training about artistic creation that Lu Hang received during his study in France, that is, how to construct and how to deconstruct.
As a research-based creator, behind each genre and style, Lu Hang will revolve around a central point, conduct in-depth research and extended reading. His reading interests and scope are extensive and deep, involving a large amount of literature, politics, religion, psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, etc., which build up Lu Hang’s solid creative thinking and lay the foundation for him to master diverse and rich genres.
Lu Hang’s early creative style was deeply influenced by George Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz, two German neo-expressionist artists. Baselitz’s artistic style is characterized by reversing the subject and painting with his fingers, with a rough, spontaneous quality that directly attracts the viewer’s intuition. Lüpertz is known for his versatile and strong visual impact. His works are full of reflections on history and reality, especially his “Arcadia” series created in the past decade, which is filled with imagination of mankind's past history and distant future.
This philosophical artistic style has an important influence on Lu Hang, making his works have a subjective and individual posture, presenting the bright and hidden aspects of human nature in his works. Starting from Lu Hang’s creative themes and context, we can witness his complete closed-loop thinking and practice on the exploration of human nature, which can be summarized as two main tendencies: the “disenchantment” and the “re-enchantment” of human nature.
The series of works such as “Pavlov and Children”, “Gymnastic”, “Bowl, Spoon, Bread and Top”, “Mad King and Mad Dog”, “Old Man in the Mountains”, “Ghost”, “Bat”, “Second Life Form”, etc., reveal the changes and alienation that people experience as a biological existence under the joint action of society, culture, history, environment, etc., from birth, to being endowed with social attributes, to human alienation, death and the possibility of rebirth. These works, with a sharp and cold perspective, reveal deep insights and criticisms, and also have profound philosophical and sociological significance.
After seemingly exhausting the possibilities of this series of explorations, especially with the outbreak of the global pandemic and the world’s geopolitical conflicts and wars, the questions that Lu Hang had been thinking about since he was a teenager resurfaced: What is the significance of painting for this era? What can art bring to this world? Why do artists exist?
During this period, Lu Hang’s creative style was inspired by Henri Matisse, a French Fauvist painter, Francisco Goya, a Spanish artist, and Poussin, a French classical artist. Matisse’s free picture structure, bright colors and themes full of deep love for the world and people,as well as Goya’s bold use of color, strong visual impact, bizarre and varied painting style and imagination, and direct confrontation to the coldness of reality, and Poussin’s established expression paradigm of classicism and their respective life experiences, gave Lu Hang a new understanding of the relationship between art and the world.
In 2022, Lu Hang, who had studied and lived in France for ten years, was invited to return to China as a tutor of the International Art Workshop of his alma mater, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. It was during the epidemic prevention and control period, and the last class was temporarily changed to an online course. On that day, in addition to the more than ten workshop students tutored by Lu Hang, there were more than fifty additional online auditors.
At the end of the course, Lu Hang said, “Let's all turn on our cameras, I’ll take a look at you on the last day.” When the cameras were turned on, he saw three or four heads behind the camera, and the entire dormitory was surrounded. This situation touched Lu Hang deeply, and he finally said "goodbye"to each unfamilliar face behind the cameras.
Among Lu Hang’s many experiences, this detail is like a metaphorical act: take a look at what is behind it, is it a specific person, or the truth of the world, or the essence of things?
During this year’s workshop course, facing the students’ works, Lu Hang was once moved and saddened to the point of needing to use a brief pause to calm his emotions. He found that some experiences have an almost irreversible impact and wear on people. Under the generally strong oppressive, confrontational, sad, and escapist emotional works, Lu Hang said to his students, I would rather hope that you never have to bear these, you can have no such burden, simply depict a light and shadow, a variation of color, a harmless ordinary life fragment.
These moments that touched Lu Hang, and his past experiences, produced a strong empathy. He had been treated sincerely, dignifiedly and equally by his teacher, and he also faced his students in the same way.
In Lu Hang’s overall artistic creative thinking and emotion, he experienced a major change from the “disenchantment” to the “re-enchantment” of human nature. Years of overseas life and travel experiences around the world have extended his vision and feelings. His works have also changed from the usual large-scale heavy oil painting series to the exploration of diverse styles such as light collage and watercolor, and quietly injected a trace of reconciliation, softness, and warmth into the usual cold and sharp emotions. Everything seems to be entering him more deeply, and everything is not just staying where they have always ended.
For Lu Hang, the best day is every ordinary day when “I have been painting all day”. When he was on a trip due to professional work and had to leave his studio for almost a month, he posted a message on WeChat Moments:
I remember, when I was a child, playing with my friends in the building complex. It was getting dark, and under the blue skylight, I gradually saw the gentle tungsten lights of each family lighting up and leaking out of the windows onto the street. At that time, I would suddenly realize that I had been playing for too long and should go home.
I really want to go back to the studio as soon as possible, there are so many paintings, still waiting for me to paint.
A picture followed these words: a golden wheat field spreads out from the front to the distance. There is a faint village on the horizon further away. Above the village is a vast and distant sky covered with clouds.
This may be a metaphorical call for painting to Lu Hang.
艺 术 家
The Artist
Author: Liu Siyuan
Artwork images: Lu Hang
Translator: Karen Ma
