City.Theater: Lu Hsien-Ming Solo Exhibition

8 November - 2 December 2008

City Memorial 

 

Chang Ching-Wen 

 

 

Compared with his past work, Lu Hsien-Ming's paintings in his 2008 solo exhibition City.Theater, has a little more of a deliberately calm and sober aspect. He continues, or maybe we can say, reexamines a few themes he constructed in the past. These include his Pedestrian Overpassseries from 1991 to 1996,and his figurative series after 1997, but in his current work, Lu Hsien-Ming attempts to endue these themes with more significance by employing mixed-media.

 

Gigantic architectural structures were the only subjects occupying Lu's previous paintings. These transportation structures, like overpasses and highways all make clear the artist's impression of the city with oppressive volumes. These reinforced concrete structures, painted in somber tones with a great quantity of restless brush marks, form arteries sustaining the development of the city, and towering trestles supporting bridges, seem to serve as memorials to the city in Lu's work. Presently, these roads and bridges can still be found in his paintings, but their construction material has changed to stainless steel, and these segments of polished metal with mirror-like surfaces become abstract elements. They appear as bundles of smooth and shiny linear forms, which seem like actual, physical objects that have been compressed into transcendental bits of soul, and enshroud the dim city which serves as their background. These details, which were originally depicted as they truly are, after being transformed into almost completely flat and smooth geometric forms and placed in thick and heavy metal frames studded with screws, create paintings that are like commemorative photos of the city, and suspend the flow of time in the background scene. The sharp edges of the metal gleam, yet create a tragic and timeless grandeur. 

 

We discover a portrait of a maturing Taipei City in Lu Hsien-Ming's work that began in the early 1990s. However, when the artist takes another look and depicts the city again after these ensuing twenty years, his glorification and similar scenes are touched with criticism. From the surface, roads and bridges mediating the flowing imagery of the city remain colossal, and just as before, make us look up, but have a more retro appearance in these current paintings, as if we are looking at images of progress from the past. Although these structures have always served as important conduits of everyday movement from place to place, they have never been the focal points of our lives. 


By selecting fragments of the city, Lu Hsien-Ming chooses to memorialize actual objects within our purview. Those keenly elaborated pieces of stainless steel that feature prominently in these recent paintings have not only attained the importance of stele-like monumental imagery, but can also be regarded as new artistic vocabulary resulting from his last twenty years of exploration. Lu has chosen representative objects and simplified them into abstract forms, turned them inside out on the foundation he previously created and then added more of his unique expressive power. 

 

Besides urban construction, another of Lu's explorations revolves around people in the city who are usually neglected. Lu starts out from his own observations of people around him or people who are usually referred to as citizens. He is especially interested in the elderly or itinerant vendors on the fringes of society who are regarded as the source of problems by the mainstream. Lu finds it emotionally difficult to part with these kinds of people. Since the 1990s, Lu Hsien-Ming has been documenting people and events that he encounters in his daily life with a camera as a way to seek appropriate subjects to choose from for his paintings. Often images linger in his mind for ten years before he has an opportunity to use them in his work, and then become the figure that is gazing out of a painting at the viewer. 

 

Several new paintings from 2008 continue with biographical sketches of these forgotten people caught in the crevices of the city and struggling to survive. In addition to these anonymous people he photographs on the streets, Lu also uses his close friends as subjects for his paintings. He channels his impressions of these people into his paintings, such as in his seriesEight Hantoo Immortals, where he combines the founding members of the Hantoo Art Group with folk tales of the eight immortals. Besides aligning these fantastic legendary tales with the many years of artistic persistence and friendship of these artists, Lu's intention is also to make his own subjective constructs a part of the local history of Taiwan. The large scale canvases in this series are framed with heavy stainless steel frames and include LED subtitles indicating the birthday of each figure and the current time. Lu wishes these signs made up of little dots of flowing light to capture the formless feeling of time. The distant backgrounds of the figures frozen in his paintings are constricted by solid metal frames, and we can see the significance of this paradigm set up by the artist. 

 

When discussing his own work, Lu Hsien-Ming has said, “In twenty-first century Taiwan, the distance and emptiness of modern technology, along with the coldness of civilization are mixed with the warmth of humanity to create the intriguing landscape of this new island nation. Interlocking and complex feelings wrap structural magnificence, and this substantial framework supports a delicate and sensitive nervous system.” Therefore, the interactions between oil paint, metal and LED in Lu Hsien-Ming's recent works, are a geological record that the artist has created of Taipei; the experience of growing up and observing people and events on this island has been recorded by the paintbrush of Lu the historian. While his presentation style has continually changed, Lu's concepts have remained consistent all along. The artist observes things from a theatrical point of view, and between the shows, he collects fragments of the city and waits for an opportunity to present them as historical testaments.