All the Tradition Already Disappeared Painfully
- Recent Photographs of Lu Xiaochuan

Wang Chunchen

What is China? What is China's modernization? At the same time, how does contemporary art of China capture the changes of all the delicate feelings? A group of photographic works of Lu Xiaochuan have reflected the problems recently. Art is not only the expression of personal experience, but also the descriptive vision of personal concept. Furthermore, it is the product of an artist observing and exploring the world. There is nothing but these points for today's meaningful art. It is unprecedented that China's reality is changed dramatically. If the artists can not respond to it, I am afraid that they will lose many things as a valuable artist.

In this regard, China's artists should go beyond the limitations of history and personal taste of indulgence, and transcend the short-term form for fun. Today¡¯s China requires many more creative artists, but not mediocre artists indulging in the style for form for form's sake. Do Artists need emotion? Does the art need the realistic visual power? The problem appears to be a platitude in fact, but not many artists can answer it. Therefore, there appear the difference of the current artists and the diversity of the meaning. Those who create meaning, of course, should take further step forward, and those art critics should be sensitive to it, whose voice should focus on the pursuit of artistic expression in chaos.

Lu Xiaochuan does not have an ostentatious character as an artist, but he is always immersed in the heart of self-reflection, and often feels anxious about how to explore the visual language. He likes such visual expression as poetry, but does not wish to fall into the luxury of lyrical pictures. However, he tries to produce the images with the visual connotation through the pursuit of a clairvoyance form. So, he searches for his image of the language, creates his kingdom of vision, and catches instant historical traces and social meaning in space beyond the visual appearance, in order to achieve an ultimate aim of recording our changing world. He creates a surreal beautiful picture of the world in his latest pictures that reveals all taken away in the process of fission of Chinese society, which seems that a falling star fries over the sky, and suddenly light up a corner of the dark world. Contemporary China's society is a society of structural change and structural weightlessness loss of society, in which lot of life experiences and cultural awareness we had had have disappeared. We have been unconsciously re-created, but we still can not cure the pain in heart: a sense of rootlessness has become the general psychological symptoms, since the past no longer exists and all the new changes are still pregnant. There is no " why not return back when farmland has been deserted" calls, for it can retire after all; there is no sigh of "Where is my hometown when the dusk is coming down" too, for that is, after all, the fond memory of hometown; there is still further no romance and fantasy of "dwelling on the land at ease", thinking that the real life is perfect. His images appear to create a mental representation of the imbalance: Elegant Chinese culture has disappeared painfully, the weak pulse of the culture seems to be as a dream, and the skeleton is the various residual marks on it.

This is precisely the visual metaphor that highlights the characteristics of the contemporary photographic art: you can consciously see visual images as a means of artistic expression of ideas, rather than as a passive acceptance of reality. Visual images can pass through our psychological world, and give the images a direct dimension of thinking. Meanwhile, his works also shows that the image can take on the colors of "depression" like elegies.

On August 7, 2008, CAFA, Beijing