Window Variations 2021-2022
During the pandemic, I spent day after day confined within a window, gazing outward—until I began to contemplate the window itself. It became a threshold between inside and outside, between self and other, a metaphor that extended into vision, into culture’s “mechanisms of seeing.” At the Women Artists Association presentation, I remarked that any moment can be the best time to create—if one finds the right metaphor. For me, in that period, the metaphor was the window, and from it unfolded a symphony of ever-changing variations.
Old Windows, 2021
Old Windows
An old object becomes a part of a painting installation by a contemporary artist and enters the scene of modern life. It becomes a daily companion of people's spiritual life. It gives people a feeling of both the old and the new, in fact, the old into the new. In reverse view, the old window attached to the work, as a spiritual object absorbing the breath of time and space, becomes a potential reminder in the new environment. The object draws people's spirit through the time and space tunnel it once experienced, making people's flat spiritual world deeper and bringing comfort.
The window is the human eye used to observe the outside world, but also hints at the fate of the human self - imprisonment. The old window gives an air of nihilism or optimism to the fate that human life cannot fundamentally change, while this opposite feeling comes from the window of each person's own different time and space.
Window Bian, 2021
Window BIAN
selected by a review by Mana Contemporary
...This year, I've traveled a lot and did many different artworks, but all these works are focused on one job: the window project. In fact, the window project is a series of variations of window, which consists of many parts. The theme of window spawns many sub-themes. At September, the International association of female Artists in USA did my online exchange show which titled Bleak and Prosperous.I used works of different times and situations to illustrate the relationship between the variability of time and space Windows and the richness of artistic creation and appreciation.This deceptively simple fact calls into question the active and forced idolization of today's successful commercial artists. And I also try to answer the possible of unity between the diversity and”this artist“
Mana’s ongoing Open House give me the opportunity to show sub-projects or small systems of the window projects with different faces each time, so I'm excited. For example, in Open House in October, I showed Windows Book. In this exhibition, I mainly want to discuss the phenomenological relationship between meaning and image. That is to say, I take calligraphy as the hidden meaning behind the window of phenomena, and then reverse the "meaning" behind the window and juxtapose it with the image representing phenomena on the same plane. I think this is a response to the zero-depth trend of meaning in our time.
At the upcoming Open House in November, I will present " Window BIAN". BIAN, pronounced in Chinese, has many meanings. I can translate it as sitting by a window, or window frame. BIAN or edge, means frame, if there's a frame, there's a window. Laozi's philosophy holds that the window is nothingness, and he emphasizes the use of "nothingness". I think even "nothing" has a certain material basis, such as frames. If art is the window of the invisible spirit, then the frame is the necessary material to help the invisible spirit present. It can be said that the frame is the more implicit, explicit, and metaphorical part between the invisible and the visible world.
The most obvious intention that these different boxes hope to show is that even if the scenery outside the window is similar or the same, due to the development of history, the frame of the material world has changed, people's vision has changed, causing your personal experience and knowledge of the inner window to change as well. In the end, the world outside our window is always different. To convey this idea, I designed some different frames from traditional, rigid frames. While they may no longer look like frames, they will always consist of a few edges. In fact, on a deeper level, I am using a framework of deconstruction and reorganization to suggest how different visual experiences are formed.
M: What are your inspirations?
L：This theme was originally inspired by my experience living in upstate New York last winter. During the long snowy days, I spent a lot of time looking out the window at the bleak scenery, which gave me the idea to do a concept art piece about Windows. This Window sensitivity may also be due to the fact that I spent half a year working and living in a windowless semi-basement studio in Brooklyn, completing a work of homeless action art. However, I am able to deepen and change this theme constantly, on the one hand, because the changing situation of sojourners makes me deeply feel the different feelings and understandings of different time and space; On the other hand, it comes from thinking about the very subtle cultural clash and fusion that happened to me. This imperceptible genetic influence on my artistic expression is like an invisible window in my brain.
Finally, to be honest, I was also inspired by the environment of Mana. There are artists from all over the world. In my opinion, every artist is a window. I hope to have the opportunity to contact more different Windows and finally show my own unique window to the world. Thank you very much.
Window Book Exhibition
When we look at the world, we need to look through both the outside window and our own window. The former is limited by time and space, while the latter is limited by experience. The reason why the world in our eyes is complicated is that although time, space and experience limit viewing, they also endow viewing with more layers. A thousand readers have a thousand quotes from Hamlet, only from the perspective of reception, not from the perspective of creation and time and space at the same time. In different time and space, the experiences and positions of creators and viewers will change accordingly, so the Hamlet in the eyes of a thousand readers should be infinite, this is the charm of windows.
When we try to represent phenomena with words, the meaning behind phenomena begins to emerge. Juxtaposing words with visual phenomena produces a graphic text. However, the readability and logic of ordinary text override the visual ability, so the visibility and readability of graphic text are separated.
Cezanne showed the invisible third dimension in the picture, which inspired the cubism era or the flatbed era of visual art to express the three-dimensional world with plane mode. The juxtaposition of calligraphy and visual images in today's exhibition is intended to emphasize the visibility and sensibility of the text. Because calligraphy has more characteristics of individual experience, it is used to emphasize the role of individual experience window on the external visual world. The window of experience is always hidden behind the outer window of time and space as the background. Most of the time, people don't acknowledge or realize that they view things empirically. Here, calligraphy is a metaphor as a window on the artist's individual experience reaffirming our different perspectives on the world. Therefore, calligraphy, as a metaphor of visible characters and invisible Windows of individual experience, juxtaposes with the representation world we see, thus forming a real visual window book.
The significance of window book lies in that it can be used to solve the problem that has been troubling the art circle for a long time, that is, how to distinguish the artistic quality under the background of "everything is art", and the contradiction between artists' deliberate pursuit of individual symbols and their passion and honest attitude of artistic creation under the background of the inundate commercial art.（Loy Luo,02/10/2021))
International Association of Female Artists video seminar: "Dialogue with Loy Luo: Desolation and Prosperity - The Charm of Windows"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M22HLHWBgxg
Curatorial Summary
Loy Luo’s Prelude to the Window Variations emerged from her pandemic experience, when confinement transformed the window into both subject and metaphor. In these works, the window is no longer a neutral architectural frame but a threshold between inside and outside, self and other. It expands into a cultural lens—an “eye” through which vision, perception, and identity are refracted.
Critically, Luo turns the act of looking into a meditative practice: observation becomes dialogue, and the window becomes a site where solitude encounters imagination. What began as daily contemplation of light, glass, and frame evolves into a layered symphony of shifting “windows,” offering viewers an entry point into the artist’s exploration of perception, cultural memory, and the poetics of distance.
