Loy Luo
CaveMan
Dec. 9th-20th, 2023
Meilun Art Museum-Beijing
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
Installation View
Exhibited Works
Loy Luo is a Chinese artist living in New York. She holds a master's degree from the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology and has taught at the Beijing Institute of Business Administration. As the Loy Luo space owner, Luo created the concept of "Open Theater". In her space in the Tribeca gallery district, she continuously displays exhibitions of different themes with a frequency and appearance similar to post-industrial production. While maintaining the quality of art, the space is open to artists of various backgrounds, experiences, and achievements as much as possible to explore the depth and diversity of the selected themes. In recent years, Luo's core creative concept has been Action Art. First, she believes that concepts cannot remain at the level of slogans but should be implemented and presented through concrete actions. For example, she shares her art space with artists and implements the slogans "15 minutes of fame" and "Everyone is an artist" in the form of thematic exhibitions; compared with those politically colored slogans, she concludes the exploration of art itself: not only famous artists can create excellent works, and not only good artists can create good works. This is also the underlying logic of her emphasis on the works of artists at all levels and her efforts to provide equal opportunities for communication and display. Secondly, the concept of her action art integrates factors such as time, space, people, and ideas, greatly expanding the boundaries of previous action art and integrated media art, and is more holistic and constructive than the former two. For example, the works "The Other I" and "Homeless" that explored identity at the beginning of the pandemic are not just framed exhibits but cover the artist's specific living state, creative motivation, time, process, communication, exhibition, dialogue and space conversion.During her passive stay in New York in the middle of the pandemic, the works involving cultural introspection that lasted for two years: such as "Window", "Eyes", and "Palimpsest", extended the material window of art to the historical and cultural dimension outside the window; with the adaptation and deepening of New York life, the artist's experience in the use of space and in-depth research on abstract art creation stimulated the evolution of the "Abstract Theater" series of works; Finally, driven by factors such as the reflection on contemporary art ecology, the advent of a large macro-comprehensive action art work called "Open Theater" was prompted. Before coming to the United States, Luo's artistic creations were mainly paintings and sculptures. Her art is known for its rich layers, restrained energy, and profound thoughts. Her works have been exhibited or collected in China, Italy, France, the United States, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, and others. www.loyluo.art
Loy Luo in her Beijing studio 2017
