LOY LUO
To Be Endorsed,
or Not To Be Endorsed?
The Inner Field of Legitimacy in Contemporary Art
2025.11 Loy Luo Space — New York
Chronicle Note
To Be Endorsed, or Not To Be Endorsed? constitutes a reconsideration of the relationship between artistic autonomy and external recognition in Loy Luo’s practice. Rather than rejecting the existing art system, the exhibition places “legitimacy” itself back into question: beyond institutional recognition, can sustained artistic practice, cultural memory, and the artist’s independent actions constitute another basis for the generation of value?
Exhibition Overview
To Be Endorsed, or Not To Be Endorsed? is an exhibition by Loy Luo that reflects structurally on the contemporary art system and its mechanisms of legitimacy.
Within the complex global art system, endorsement operates as an implicit institutional mechanism: it participates in the validation of artistic value while shaping how artists are seen, named, and positioned within established structures. To Be Endorsed, or Not To Be Endorsed? therefore poses a question: to be endorsed, or not to be endorsed?
The question is not intended as a rejection of the existing art system, but as a reconsideration of the relationship between institutional structures and artistic existence. Must artistic legitimacy derive solely from external designation, recognition, and institutional discourse? Or might another possibility emerge—from the artist’s own spiritual structure, reactivated cultural memory, and cultural practices extending across millennia?
Through spatial installation, walls inscribed with philosophical texts, and paintings from the Earthenware series, Luo transforms the exhibition space into a site of structural experimentation. Here, external recognition is placed in tension with the artist’s own actions, thought, and practice, while legitimacy itself shifts from an assumed condition to a question that must be reconsidered.
The spatial configuration of the exhibition also draws poetic cues from images of a long river, the setting sun, and wholeness, allowing the continuity of light, space, and time to enter into this structural inquiry.
Keywords: Art and Legitimacy, Institutional Mechanisms, Self-Endorsement, Cultural Memory, Artistic Practice
Fragments of the Exhibition
⭕️ Calligraphy with Bracelets Zen Appropriation, Pop in Reverse On the street-facing window ledge, several everyday bracelets are placed—casually yet with precision—on top of handwritten calligraphy. At first glance, it resembles a display of jewelry, but it is in fact a naturally occurring work of contemporary art. Its formation follows the logic of much of my practice: arising from an unpremeditated, intuitive gesture, yet unfolding into multiple layers of cultural structure. The initial impulse comes from Zen painting—where the “circle” is traditionally rendered by brushstroke, I substitute it with the physical circle of an object. Replacing brush with object, replacing the Zen ensō with a commodity, this substitution becomes both an act of appropriation and a reversed translation of Zen pictorial language. Thus, the work first takes shape as a Zen that is anti-Zen. Zen painting aspires to purity and restraint; here I replace its spiritual emblem with an object of desire. Just as Zen masters have said that “entering the red-light district is also a form of practice,” this “circle of material desire” more accurately reveals Zen’s paradoxical essence. Following this emerges a Pop that is anti-Pop. Traditional Pop art parodies consumer culture by reproducing images of commodities; what I appropriate here is not the image but the commodity itself. It does not masquerade as art, nor does it seek museum sanctification. It exists in the most ordinary manner, in the corner of a street-facing space. A real consumer object is reframed, and its estrangement acquires a force that exceeds the theatricality of Pop. The overlap between calligraphy and bracelets is not decorative—it is a conceptual displacement. Calligraphy embodies an Eastern spiritualism, a space outside consumption; the bracelet carries contemporary corporeality, circulation, and commodity value. When the two meet, spirit is gently disturbed by matter, and matter is pulled upward by spirit— the boundaries of value lose their stability. Zen and commodity, asceticism and desire, traditional symbols and contemporary objects become mirrors to one another, penetrating and translating each other. This gesture is both an incidental moment and a structural act of rewriting. In this delicate superimposition, I am less concerned with the objects themselves than with how images continually generate in the tension between cultures— between softness and sharpness, between East and West, between gesture and meaning.
⭕️ Wrapped Images — A Theater of Concealment, Emergence, and Rewriting In these works, small abstract paintings are partially wrapped in torn or folded paper and placed against backgrounds densely filled with handwritten text. Each image appears suspended in an in-between state— as if freshly unearthed, yet simultaneously on the verge of being re-covered. The wrapping paper serves neither as protection nor as obstruction, but as a second skin for the image. It delays visibility, slowing down the viewer’s gaze and introducing hesitation, pause, and re-orientation. The image no longer presents itself as something immediately accessible; instead, it becomes an arrival in progress—a presence not yet fully formed. The handwritten text behind the paintings introduces another layer of tension. It does not narrate, nor does it explain. Rather, it forms a field of visual noise in which the viewer becomes aware that: every image is surrounded, framed, and rewritten by language. The image, the text, and the wrapping material intertwine to create a theater of visibility: The image is concealed, yet concealment becomes its mode of appearance. The paper acts as packaging, but also as surface, history, and residue. The text serves as background and interference, a cultural framework the image cannot escape. These works do not simply present images; they present the conditions under which images appear. Each piece becomes an act of rewriting: The image is renamed through the opening and closing of paper; The handwritten text becomes a silent stage; The viewer’s gaze is drawn into the continuous process of revelation. This is the second life of the image— and the first moment of seeing.
⭕️ Ladder of Scriptures — A Vertical Organ of Language and Reverse Cultural Translation In this installation, an old ladder is wrapped, layered, and draped with hand-copied texts. The ladder is no longer a tool or symbol of ascent, but becomes a vertical organ of language. It gestures toward an upward, outward, and unknown movement of thought; yet the densely accumulated scriptures render ascent nearly impossible— as if the more thought attempts to rise, the more it is pulled back by the weight of language. The surrounding walls, saturated with handwritten text, turn the entire space into a “theater of language.” The ladder is not an isolated object but a fragile spine within a sea of writing— attempting to break through the enclosure of text, only to be drawn back into it again. Notably, the textual composition on the ladder is more intricate than that on the walls. Alongside Chinese transcriptions of Western philosophy, it incorporates the Buddhist Heart Sutra and traces of English. This hybrid mixture of languages more closely mirrors the lived condition of a cross-cultural individual navigating a foreign system— where thought is repeatedly decomposed, reassembled, and reshaped by shifting linguistic environments.
Artists Dialogue
Related Research
This exhibition extends Loy Luo’s ongoing research into artistic legitimacy, institutional recognition, and self-generated fields of meaning. More reading is here：
The Backed and the Void: A Structural Call for Legitimacy in Contemporary Art
The Backed and the Void: A Study on the Institutional Genesis of the Self-Endorsement Mechanism
