Known for her use of traditional Chinese costumes and vibrant textiles, Lu Luo encounters the canvas as a stage upon which stories come together, woven into a colourful tapestry through which narratives of identity and expression are felt in the intricacies of texture. Born in Sichuan, China, Lu grew up in the midst of the hustle and bustle of an opera house, joining her parents and their theatre group during their tours around the province. Inspired by the fervour of Chinese opera, Lu often applies elements of the visual and formal language of its gestures and costumes, physically intertwining and recontextualising the traditional garments into her art as the substance of drama to empower and rethink the notions of femininity, nationality, mediality, and belonging.
Lu has developed her works into a distinct style that expresses an attunement to the complexities of beauty and pain, darkness and light, as the composition of surfaces in flux. The notions of strength and vulnerability form a union in the tangibility of the rhythms of colour, form, and materiality within her image, as Lu approaches them with a playful yet dauntless tenderness. Moving away from the nostalgia of her earlier works, Lu has pushed the elements of memory and sentimentality further into divergent directions in her recent works. Her techniques have evolved from re-appropriating the original fabrics of traditional costumes into a more abstract approach to art, life, and the notions of form and representation, using gradients of colour and line to compose each piece into an affective environment that conceals and reveals the constant movement within – like a never-ending dance.
