Lu Shengzhong at Chambers Fine Art

Born in rural Shandong, one of China's coastal provinces, Lu Shengzhong grew up exposed to many folk-art traditions. He studied fine art in Shandong, then earned a master's degree in folk art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he is a professor of folk art today. In his work, Lu has refined one of China's oldest folk techniques--decorative paper-cutting--for his own purposes. For generations, the Chinese have made richly patterned, lacelike tissue-paper cutouts by hand and used them to accompany gifts or as accoutrements of rituals. With little more than scissors and homemade knives, Lu has made the technique his own.

In this respect, Lu stands distinctly apart from dozens of other Chinese contemporary artists who were quick to embrace or imitate Western styles or approaches--most notably, conceptual, mixed-media installation art--in the late 1980s, when the government's fledgling economic reforms began to open the door to cultural influences from abroad. Lu uses red tissue paper; red, in Chinese culture, is a symbol of life. Lu's work is dominated by a signature motif he calls "Little Red Figure." A sprightly, androgynous human form with outstretched arms and legs, it has appeared in infinite repetition in the many mandala-like wall and site-specific pieces Lu has created to date.

In his most recent works, collectively titled "The Book of Humanity," Lu assembled numerous variations of his red-on-black or black-on-red collages within handsome bound volumes. Some feature Western-style bindings; others use traditional Chinese sewn bindings. Some of the books' collage pages were crafted from scraps left over from his paper cutting (in effect, the negative spaces around his cut-out figures). In addition, he created wall-mounted abstract works, filling the pictorial space of each one with thick clusters or fluffy billows of Little Red Figures. Beneath each of these pieces, he exhibited the "brick" from which the figures had been extracted--thousands of the iconic creatures had been cut from this thick stack of red tissue paper.

Both Lu's books and his related "picture" works resemble mysterious artifacts from an unknown civilization. Because a human form, however abstracted, lies at the very heart of his art, and because he has developed a vivaciously expressive formal language around it, Lu's unusual, inventive creations exude a sense of unabashed humanism. The Little Red Figure, Lu has written, represents "the common innocence of humanity."

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group