LOY LUO
Chronicle Note
“CaveMan” brought together two distinct yet interconnected phases of Loy Luo’s artistic practice: a series of small-scale works created during her years in New York, and a group of large-scale paintings produced in the two years before her departure from Beijing, which had not previously been presented in exhibitions.
The New York works reveal a more open and liberated visual language. Through vivid colors, expanded compositions, and spontaneous gestures, they reflect Luo’s evolving perceptions of environment, movement, and personal experience after entering a new cultural context.
In contrast, the earlier large-scale paintings embody a more concentrated and monumental energy. Their dense surfaces, restrained atmosphere, and profound spiritual intensity reveal the philosophical concerns that had long shaped Luo’s practice before her international journey.
By placing these two bodies of work together, CaveMan created a dialogue between different moments of artistic development. Through the metaphor of the “cave,” the exhibition suggested that these two experiences are not oppositional, but mutually illuminating—each becoming a cave through which the other can be revealed.
Continuing Luo’s sustained exploration of cultural encounters, perception, and human existence across different contexts, CaveMan reflects her deeper engagement with the relationship between individual experience and broader cultural landscapes.
Installation View
Wang Chunchen
The Cave is an ancient metaphor. The allegory of the cave became a basic way for philosophers to debate the world and perception and reality of it. For Loy Luo, it became a way to imagine herself, her art, her worlds. To imagine anew.
Loy Luo arrived in New York in early January 2020 and planned to stay for three months. While a brief visit turned into four years of experiences. In these years, she saw a lot and thought a lot. She struggled for survival in realms she did not know. It was not easy. She tried to make sense of things in her art. She painted portraits with masks for friends she made and for strangers she came across. Then came several especially timely solo exhibitions in which Loy Luo painted “The me in others “and “The homeless” in New York. It attracted the attention of dozens in local artistic circles and in the art media.
After moving from place to place, she built her New York studio, from which she could engage the art world and that of the city itself. All the while, her vision broadened and sharpened as she painted, wrote, and enacted performance works.
In a cleft, we are caveman. When we go out, we become different caveman; we’re not the same but also not entirely different. When Loy Luo showed her work in New York, viewers there encountered what was for many of them an unusual vision of time and space. Two kinds of time and space can be found in works she brought back to Beijing and those she left in Li Qiao's studio. Look at them carefully: they may appear the same in spirit, but the energy in them is not. The works she left has strong direct impact; they are sometimes dense. The works created in New York are saturated by other atmospheres, of tenacity and firmness, of speculation about cave and non-cave.
Today's artistic creation is often in that kind of a situation in one way or another. Here is here, there is there, and they don’t seem to meet. For the cave is in a mountain; it is inseparable from the whole mountain, with its many peaks and heights, allowing boundless vistas. Yet, after the years of observing, exploring, communicating, thinking, and acting, Loy Luo is not the same one who was four years ago. This exhibition looks back and to the distance, Loy Luo’s vision rushes to the sea and to a new world.
CaveMan: An Exhibition of Loy Luo's Works
Selected Works
