Lu Li

My work is inspired by a Zen idea named “Five Skandhas" which believes everything exists in certain collections and there is all emptiness but no substance. Several times out-of-body experiences and Martin Heidegger's philosophical thoughts about time and space have also influenced me a lot in my practice to focus on the reality in the illusion and create my logic of time and space to express a certain kind of calm in anxiety or a moment of truth in falsehood.

Animal plays an important role in my work due to the feature of traditional Chinese painting to express ambition and aspiration with objective things, its lack of limitations, and its convenience to easily make emotional connections with the audience. The use of traditional Chinese painting's cavalier perspective and concept of "emptiness" in contemporary contexts is another research direction at the same time. They have profound research significance for my construction of floating absurd space. The visual perspective illusion has been used in my work without intention and the reason why I am obsessed with those interior spaces is not only my interest in architecture but also a concept from my cultural background to express big from limited sizes. By subverting the space we know best can better restore the feeling of alienation.

Technically, I’ve tried to emphasize a sense of division with the help of the silk’s transparency and acrylic sheets, objects like rope and pin are involved in some painting to discuss certain collusion of the false and the real, the subjective and the objective. I also created some puzzling spaces with burnt marks to give more possibilities to unknown and uncontrollable factors. I changed from the creation of a single absurd space to the creation of continuous space or the superposition of multi-level spaces based on my exploration of composition and material properties which are clearly reflected in my sketches.