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Luo Brothers at Sara Meltzer Art in America
April, 2007 by Eleanor Heartney
The celebration of China's capitulation to capitalism seems to be what passes for social commentary in that nominally Communist country these days. Harking back to the "Political Pop" artists of the early 1990s, the Luo Brothers by draw on traditional lacquer techniques to create paintings, reliefs and sculptures that mingle Mao-era propaganda images, kitschified versions of traditional symbols of luck and good fortune borrowed from New Year calendars, and assorted corporate logos and products representing the incursions of American consumer culture.
The works (all 2006) are frenetic in their good cheer, reflecting the mythic world of unceasing fun promulgated by advertising. In the sculptures, chubby babies grapple with soft drinks or hamburgers almost as big as they are. While each sculpture is realized in a single hue of shiny lacquer, underscoring the merging of baby and product, the wall-hung works offer a rainbow of bright colors and also a variety of formats, including hand-carved and lacquered wood reliefs, flat but equally colorful amalgams of images lacquered on wood panels, and ink paintings on rice paper. They are crowded with ornamental koi (good-luck orange carp), roosters, cranes, blossoms, sunburst stripes, ripe peaches and the ubiquitous chubby babies, who proffer such emblems of abundance as Coca-Cola bottles, hamburgers and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
In one painting, Coca-Cola cans with English and Chinese logos form the body of a pair of locomotives that charge forward behind an appropriated image of traditional courtiers on horseback. In a lacquered wall relief, a happy baby sits on top of a giant carp emblazoned with a Nestle's logo. The baby holds up a green bar upon which two tiny coolies flank a life preserver inscribed with the word Polo. Several works incorporate benevolent images of Mao, who appears as self-satisfied as all the other inhabitants of this fantasy China. With the exception of the sole oil painting, which is titled Mao and presents its eponymous subject as a youthful pioneer surrounded by cherubic babies bearing hamburgers and Coke bottles, all the works have the same title: Welcome to the World Famous Brand. The brand under consideration, one assumes, is China itself, here turned into a cliché of its most banal self-representations.
The viewer is meant, it seems, to savor the irony of conflating political propaganda, advertising and folk culture. But this is hardly an original observation any more, and in the end seems just another mask to obscure the real conditions of a country whose enormous ambitions and problems are rocking the globe.
Source: www.findarticles.com
Imitation Warmth and Cold Pleasures
By Diana Yeh - 25/08/2003
Luo Wei Guo is the second of three siblings who work collaboratively as the Luo Brothers. They produce carnivalesque lacquer paintings and ink wash scrolls that reflect the disorientating reality of contemporary Chinese society.
A Coca Cola sun radiates its imitation yellow-red warmth from behind a faded Forbidden Palace; Chairman Mao swims in blue waters towards Coca Cola buoy; a row of white puppy dogs poke rubescent tongues at oversized Coca Cola cans, on which a baby, afflicted with uncertain pink white blisters, climbs and cries.
Luo Wei Guo, born in 1964 is the second of the Luo Brothers (his elder brother Luo Wei Dong was born in 1963 and his younger brother Luo Wei Bing was born in 1972). They all grew up in Nanning, in the southern province of Guangxi, but went to different art academies. Luo Wei Guo attended the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art and graduated in 1987. By this time, he had already moved to live in Beijing and begun collaborating with his brothers.
As the names Luo Wei Dong, Wei Guo and Wei Bing - 'defenders' respectively of the 'East', the 'country' and the 'body' - might suggest, the Luo Brothers were born around the time of the Cultural Revolution in China, when political fervour still fuelled the hearts and minds of many people. Decades later and with its opening to the west, China now finds itself helter skeltering into a rapid economic development and modernisation. The effect is disorientating. Ideological idolatry is replaced by a worship of consumer goods. On the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China on 1st October, the streets now boast more Coca Cola advertisements than red national flags.
It is this new reality that forms the basis of the exuberant, fantastical, dazzling world captured in the Luo Brothers' works, such as the series, 'The Famous Brands of the World are Welcomed' (2002). Densely packed with an unruly mix of symbols, iconic images leap across time as the Luos amass together within a single space the visual vocabularies of the traditional, the revolutionary and the consumer. Impossible juxtapositions are made possible as notions of scale and perspective are gleefully dismissed. A blank red sun shines out again from behind a Forbidden Palace now wreathed in artificial blooms and hovering above a row of Coca Cola locomotives; cutesy cherubs giggle and pose on perfect bouncy golden hamburgers; two hold up a gilded mirror which endlessly reflects the same sun, the same picture, the same synthetic yellow red warmth.
Do these carnivalesque scenes proclaim the triumph of a global consumer culture? Are modernisation and commodification inescapably linked? In works such as these the Luos may prompt serious thought upon social change and development yet the horror of the spiritual emptiness of contemporary consumerism is rendered all the time with an engagingly boisterous energy. Global brands usurp the power over the collective imagination once held by slogans of political propaganda. Materialism supersedes ideals.
It might seem ironic then that to capture the glittering present, the Luo Brothers return to the past, employing two very traditional Chinese media across their repertoire: lacquer paint and ink-on-paper. The deeply saturated hues of lacquer paint, usually associated with decorative arts as opposed to fine art, creates an impenetrable gloss that completes the sheen of the material world depicted. The ink washes meanwhile are rendered in a hanging scroll format that at once recalls and parodies the tradition of classical Chinese painting. Authorial red seal impressions, a longstanding convention of literati works, appear here and there but are unconventionally placed, sometimes even at the centre of the picture plane.
With their obsessive attention to detail and craftsmanship, at odds with the banality of the objects they depict, the Luo Brothers powerfully convey the dizzying disorientation, the joy and the emptiness that characterises postmodern experience in societies across the world today.
The Luo Brothers have had solo shows in Paris, Sydney and Hong Kong and have participated in many significant international group shows at venues in the UK, Australia, Brazil, USA, France, Switzerland and China. In 2002, they were invited by the Red Mansion Foundation to participate in the exhibition 'Dream 02', supported by Visiting Arts, which brought together the works of 24 artists from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Sources include: 'Dream 02' catalogue, Red Mansion Foundation, London, 2002
Source: www.culturebase.net
