Loy Luo Space

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One of the most well-known statements in Gombrich’s The Story of Art is: “There is no such thing as Art with a capital A, there are only artists.” In the process of creating—when her focus naturally settles into the gestures of marking and writing—Loy Luo has finally discovered a way to respond to Gombrich’s proposition about art and the artist.

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In fact, the very moment humans first engaged in artistic creation, Art with a capital A was born. The artist, by contrast, is a product of art history. While working on a new series titled Before the Word, Luo realized that when an artist creates—no matter how practical or decorative the resulting object may seem to others—the seemingly unconscious act of writing or marking becomes a channel between the metaphysical and the physical. Even a so-called “primitive” person, as judged by today’s standards, might have secretly carved marks into a cave wall while asking, perhaps unknowingly: “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?”

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Luo’s mark-making series may appear to continue the innate East Asian cultural impulse toward writing, but her intent reaches far deeper—to a more primal state, to the beginning of being itself. Just as philosophers must reset to a zero-point in order to reconstruct their systems of thought, Luo believes that artists, too, must “zero out” in order to reconnect with their truest inner sensations and build their own languages.

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This process of constructing a personal language system has been long and layered: From early practices of hand-copying books to deepen memory and attention; To repeatedly transcribing Buddhist sutras as a self-imposed ritual to quiet anxiety and seek calm; To copying The Book of Songs and The Songs of Chu while living abroad to ease homesickness; To layering and juxtaposing Eastern and Western texts; To inventing pseudo-musical notations, smudging, scratching, and erasing to obscure readability and awaken the visual energy of text; To collage, installation, and the creation of blurred, ambiguous characters—All of these are experiments in a continual search for a new visual and linguistic order.

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Her most significant breakthrough is this: From the word, to before the word. It marks not only a return to a pre-linguistic state but also a leap—from culture to philosophy.

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罗一个展：文字到文字之前

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贡布里希在其《艺术的故事》中有一句广为流传的名言：“从来没有大写的艺术，只有艺术家。” 而在专注于“划”与“写”的动作与意象之中，当创作进入一种自然而然的状态后，罗一终于找到一种方式，回应了贡布里希这句关于艺术与艺术家的命题。

事实上，人类第一次进行艺术创作的那一刻，“大写的艺术”便已诞生，而艺术家——则是“艺术史”的产物。当罗一开始创作《文字之前》这一新系列作品时，她突然意识到：艺术家的创作行为，即使在他人眼中仅是某种实用性或装饰性的物件，但对创作者本人而言，那种看似无意识的“划”与“写”的动作，早已打通了形而上的通道。哪怕是一个在今日视角下被认为“未开化”的原始人，当他悄悄躲进洞穴，在墙上刻划、书写时，他的潜意识或许早已浮现出那三个终极问题：“我是谁？我从哪里来？我要到哪里去？”

罗一的“划写”系列，看似是延续了东方人骨子里“书写”这一文化惯性，但其实她的创作意念，已然回到了更本源的状态，回到“人之初”的阶段。正如哲学家需以“归零”的方式来重建自己的哲学体系，罗一也认为：艺术家同样需要通过“归零法”，回归最深层的自我感知，从而建立属于自己的语言系统。

这一语言系统的建构，是一个缓慢而复杂的过程：从最初的手写抄书，训练大脑的深度记忆与阅读；到数百遍手抄佛经，用仪式感驱逐不安、获得宁静；再到旅居海外期间抄写《诗经》《楚辞》以疏解思乡之情；再到将中西文字叠加、融合、错置；再到使用乐谱假字、涂抹、刮划，试图削弱文字的可读性，从而唤醒其视觉能量；再到拼贴装置、模糊造字……这一切种种，都是她不断推进的语言实验。

而她最大的突破，正是那一步跨越：从“文字”到“文字之前”。它不仅是一次语言的返祖，更是一场从文化通向哲学的跃迁。