Views from the exhibition room
"Red" Exhibition
06 September 2022 - 16 September 2022
Personal exhibition of the artist Hang LU
With curator Meng JIA
And guest art critic Yves KOBRY
Monday to Thursday: 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Friday: 8:30 a.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Opening: Tuesday, September 6, 2022 at 6:30 p.m.
From September 6 to September 16, 2022, the Rouge exhibition will take place in the Athéna gallery, within the Town Hall of the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Curated by Meng JIA, the exhibition will present new creations by the artist Hang LU.
Red Exhibition
Through scenes where metaphorical images takes place on a red background, the exhibition is the pictorial expression of the artist's observations and reflections on the current landscape of society, on his doubts about the cyberpunk world that will come and his unease with the new global scenario of the Cold War.
The Rouge exhibition will present about fifteen large paintings, and more than eighty small works, some of which have been created over the past two years and another part is in progress.
Donkey | 2022 | Oil on canvas | 235 x 145cm
Peintre rebelle
Born in 1987 to a father who studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and an art historian mother, Lu Hang was immersed in the artistic world from an early age. He decided to follow in his parents' footsteps by enrolling in the School of Decorative Arts in Beijing before going to study at the Fine Arts in Sichuan. After his arrival in France in 2013 he went to complete his training at the School of Fine Arts in Bourges. It is therefore a young painter who begins his career with an artistic background and know-how, something very rare for an artist of his generation. This is both an advantage and a handicap because he will have to free himself from the references and the virtuosity acquired to find his own way.
Enfant de Pavlov 9 | 2022 | Huile sur toile | 140 x 100 cm
Lu Hang, rebel painter
Born in 1987 from a father who studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and an art historian mother, Lu Hang was immersed in the artistic world from an early age. He decided to follow in his parent footsteps by enrolling in the School of Decorative Arts in Beijing before going to study at the Fine Arts in Sichuan. After his arrival in France in 2013 he went to complete his training at the School of Fine Arts in Bourges. It is therefore a young painter who begins his career with an artistic background and know-how, something very rare for an artist of his generation. This is both an advantage and a handicap because he will have to free himself from the references and the virtuosity acquired to find his own way.
Initially he was influenced by pop art, in particular by Robert Rauschenberg, borrowing his themes from mythology and socialist imagery, such as Lenin haranguing the crowd or Khrushchev in a wheat field or even young pioneers standing to attention or a military parade, in a graphic style with tangy colors, playing on the contrast between the realism of faces or postures and blurring, obliteration, drips and superimpositions. From the beginning we find in Lu Hang this desire to divert the subject, this ironic revolt against ideology, discipline and the image of propaganda.
Little by little, he will detach himself from the realism of pop culture to adopt a neo-expressionist style in the wake of Georg Baselitz and Markus Luperz. If the painter retains the taste for large formats and violent and clashing colors, the motif is simplified, refined, the form becomes more synthetic, more abstract, more rough. It intervenes on a vast colored plane, sometimes almost monochrome, like this human head, barely identifiable, which floats on a wide red river. The character is isolated, sometimes truncated, perceived in close vision, often in the presence of an animal, such as these pigs destined for the slaughterhouse or this rabbit in the laboratory. The dog, a recurring theme for the artist, serves as a symbol of the domestication and training to which human beings are also subject.
Each of his paintings has a symbolic value but the narration is no longer descriptive and anecdotal but allusive. It leaves it up to the viewer to guess or rather to freely interpret the meaning of the work. It is no longer a question of diverting a propaganda image by irony but of stimulating reflection, the imagination.
Lu Hang's work is not strictly political but has a universal and utopian scope. The hope of a world and an entirely free society where all forms of enslavement whether by ideology, religion, work or discipline would have disappeared, where man could flourish through his creativity , freely forge his personality and lead his life without hindrance.
—Yves Kobry, art critic, member of the AICA
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Art historian, art critic, and independent curator. Member of the AICA since 1988, Yves Kobry has been the curator of several exhibitions, including the exhibition "Vienna at the beginning of a century" at the Pompidou Center in 1986 with Jean Clair, and the Pascin exhibitions in 2006 and "Le constructivisme Russian. Towards new shores” in 2008 at the Maillol museum.
He collaborated with the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris on the exhibitions "1930s, le temps menace" in 1996 and Bonnard in 2006. French letters. And he has written numerous prefaces for exhibition catalogues.
at the Art Trope gallery in Paris, at the One Art Musuem in Beijing and Biennale de l'Image Tangible 21 in Paris.
Foreword
Spaces dominated by red. Light red, fluorescent red, living red, dark red... Different shades of red converge on the canvases, which are so lively and powerful. The presence of certain strange figures break this monotony of red: A huge canoe painted in garish yellow, floats alone in the sea of infinite red, empty, without passengers; a human body floats in the red river, moves with the waves, naked, without consciousness; a child with arms raised, dresses in uniform, isolated, faceless... Are they breaking free, abandoned or isolated? An eerie silence, behind the contrast between this dynamic color and the stagnant image, seems to stir. This is the feeling that the artist Hang LU wants to transfer and that he feels when he confronts history and the present. Citing Francisco de Goya as a reference, Hang LU chose photo-painting for his creation. He finds images, breaks them down, then draws attention to a fragment or detail and conveys it in a painting.
Lamb 3 | 2022 | Oil on canvas | 200 x 140 cm
These original images, historical, everyday photographs, or scenes he remembers in his mind, are no longer original scenes. They have been given a new meaning that is specific to the artist. Faces and figures in Hang LU's paintings are deliberately blurred, but these scenes remain vaguely recognizable through preserved detail. In this way, the artist reproduces “uncomfortable truths hidden in broad daylight¹”. He tries to recall memories of events that should not be forgotten. No intention to criticize or blame the past, he tries to understand and evaluate the present, and therefore to anticipate and not to see the repetition of tragedies for the future.
— Meng JIA, Curator
Exhibition curator. Born July 9, 1997 in Shanxi, China. She graduated in Economics and Management from the University of Paris-Saclay and is currently studying in the Curatorial of Contemporary Art at the IESA in Paris.
She realized under the direction of Professor David Brouzet the group exhibition Cabinet de Curiosités, which was inaugurated at the IESA gallery on March 11, 2021. She worked at the Art Trope gallery in Paris, at the One Art Musuem in Beijing and Tangible Image Biennale 21 in Paris.
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Creation Intent
In this series of works, I want to explore anti-decorative painting. I intentionally reject visual pleasure and try to seek painting free from political, religious and capitalist decoration. Allowing the language of painting to remain pure, to return to the expression itself are priorities that I consider fundamental to achieving freedom of expression in painting.
I want to be concise, clear, express the image of the time from multiple perspectives, compress the narrative. Each painting is like a cup. Gathering these cups to form a series, a study of a theme is a vector to reinforce the strength of each work.
The image in the painting is magnified as a mean of intensification. This enlargement elicits a sense of distance from our everyday experience, allowing the painting to assert itself in its simplicity. I want my images to be tough and strong. I want my paintings to speak for themselves, like a bulwark against cold reality.
Bols | 2022 Huile sur toile 120 x 200
The image in the painting is magnified as a means of intensification. This enlargement elicits a sense of distance from our everyday experience, allowing the painting to assert itself in its simplicity. I want my images to be tough and strong. I want my paintings to speak for themselves, like a bulwark against cold reality.
I want to emphasize the process of painting as well as the expressive and expressed nature of the brush stroke. The brush is a metonymy of the artist by becoming an extension of his perception, thus depicting personal feelings and experiences. The viewer can infer the state of the person behind the painting through the marks on the image, and in a dialogue the viewer can see himself the artist drawing himself through the painting. Each painting is therefore more than just a painting.
The most important thing in art for me is sincerity. I want to show that sincerity in my work because I can't cheat when it comes to myself and the outside world, and I can't express what I don't have. I want the work I create, the fruit of my sincerity, to be felt by others. I am convinced that sincerity can bring kindness, and only kindness can produce beauty. I therefore choose this path and dedicate myself to making each of my works a sincere painting.
— LU Hang , Artist
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The Chinese artist-painter. Born May 15, 1985 in Beijing. He mainly practices oil painting and also collage. He studied fine arts at the Sichuan School of Fine Arts between 2006 and 2010. He obtained the diploma (DNSEP) at the National School of Art in Bourges in 2016 and continued his studies at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.