Lu Zhengyuan

by£º Michela Sena

Human organs are magnified and reproduced hyperrealistically on large canvas, a wide open eye revealing the milky cornea and the intricate capillary network, a blood-sprayed heart surface with vessels and coronaries branching out, a close up of human feces, an assemblage composed of close ups of skin with discoloration and imperfections. This is human anatomy displayed in a desecrating way, trascended and then turned into art, plus the choice of using big canvas, does not give us much of a choice than looking at it.

This is Lu Zhengyuan¡¯s paiting style: violent and shocking. His extremely subtle painting technique can, where necessary, get to the perfection of hyperrealism, but at the same time it can surpass the esthetic element, aiming to express the concept which is at the very basic of his whole artistic production.

Reality itself does not exist, at least according to the artist. Reality in the hands of the arstist is a medium, just like the sign in Saussure¡¯s semiology or as Umberto Eco puts it ¡¡ãit is something that represents somenthing else¡¡À.

Truculent human anatomy, reproduced as realistically as possible, become charming and aesthetic works of art. It is possible to get over the detail because captivated by the asthetic aurea of the work of art. That heart reproduced with crude objectivity is not human flesh anymore, but it has turned into an asthetic, marvellous and mesmerizing object. What matters of Lu Zhengyuan pieces of art, is not the object itself, but the choice of representing it, together with the way of representing it. All this is functional, it is to say, communicate sensations. In Lu Zhengyuan¡¯s art reality is disintegrated, it reveals sensations and emotions felt by the abstraction of reality.

Lu Zhengyuan stricly follows this concept, and his production, which greatly varies in terms of diversity of expressive communication, always sticks to the same concept. This is how the artist operates: he starts from an idea, which could be a detail of a concrete object, but also a history, an image or an anecdote which belongs to our cultural heritage. Then he uses the idea as a mean to express moods, sensations, emotions, which are not necesserely related to the original object. The reality of the concrete world does not exist, however it will not be our cognitive heritage neither our culture, the reference measurements for our understanding.

Big sculptural groups of white resin representing completely naked human figures. The glossy surface of the enamel, emphasizes the purity of the skin, the glabrous heads and the sintetic  shapes are very far from a plastic representation of the phisicality of the human body. Once more, these are all symbols. Some scenes recall the Weastern mythological stories, such as the she-wolf feeding Romulus and Remus, becomes the sculpture ¡¡ãshe-wolf¡¡À: a man lying on the ground is represented while drinking milk from the breasts of a big she-wolf standing above him. The man is an adult, is not a baby as in the traditional representation of the mythological scene; his brother is not next to him, while the man is representend as an individual. He does not have any connotative detail, his head is glabrous, his skin is diaphanous, it is the essence of a man. The genitals are reproduced very carefully in details, stressing on the sexual gender, overpassing the mythological origin of the representation, and hinting to the conflit of sexes. The word She-wolf in Chinese is also used to insult women, as to refer to a sly, unfaithful, powerful and unscrupulous woman.

The sculpture ¡¡ãrib¡¡À also refers to a story belonging to our cultural heritage, it is the biblical scene of the extraction of the rib from Adam¡¯s body, from where the woman is believed to be originated. This group consists in two women holding a knife, symbol of Adam¡¯s rib, who are about to stab the man. The man is stuck on the ground, he is struggling in his last effort of releasing himself before dying. Once again, the mythological episode is the starting point that will be overpassed. In Lu Zhengyuan¡¯s representation, the woman are violent and strong and the man cannot defende himself from their aggression; they are carnages and the whole scene communicates anxiety and a sensation of strong instability. The starting point, the biblical story, used as a symbol, as a hint to the superiority of the masculine gender over the fememine one, has been inverted.  

In Lu Zhengyuan¡¯s poetics the attention is focused on the psycology of the individual, and on the sensations of the artist¡¯s private world. His work of art communicates what is hiddend in his mind, they are pure sensations or state of mind and feelings coming from the unconscious magma, in other words, his sensitivity. It is an universe of lived experiences, traumas, cultural notions, onirical images, which stay out of space-time conventions, but are kept inside his intimate sphere. Reality and culture are only an intermediate stage of knowledge, if we manage to overpass them, then we get to the ultimate stage of knowledge: the perception of the world filterd by our unconsciousness. Art is the only mean to express this level of perception. In Lu Zhengyuan¡¯s work the artistic representation is often deliberatly put on a dialectic level related reality.

The dyptich representing two dead natures of flowers and fruits, consists in a photograph of a composition of real fruits, real deadflowers and leaves, and another photograph potraiting a composition of fake flowers and fruits, made by the arstist. The composition of fake flowers is extremely similar to the real one and is a deliberate attempt of tricking the viewer, who no matter how hard he will try, he will not be albe to distiguish the fake from the real one. Behind a metaphor, the artist wants to express the concept of reality which is not the art of the real, but an art able to communicate what is beyond reality. The detachment from reality, the esthetic analysis and the attention to the individual perception, is a constant element in the art of the new generation of Chinese artists. Today they stress on the individuality, from which derives the incresingly more common practice of conceptualism. By looking at art from an Marxist analysis, art is always relative, depending on the economic structure of the society in which it develops; with this premise we can understand well how young artists working in China in 2010, are nowadays representing the second season of art. This new generation is way far from topics such as social protest and collective commitment. For the first time, this generation has discovered its own importance, its own individuality, and stresses on the individuality in a dialectic form against collectivity. We are living a kind of, ¡¡ãpost-modern Renaissance¡¡À, to use a fashionable but useful saying, to explicit the idea of the big revolution. Step by step, without loud shouting or traumas, it is slowly changing the distinctive characteristics of an artistic praxis, but also of a whole culture.