Loy Luo
Before the Word and After the Word
April 5th- August 15th, 2025
Loy Luo Space 101 Lafayette Street, New York
About
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
Red Mountain Culture, 48*48",Oil on Canvas, 2023
On Site
Works in the Show
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
