A Rebellious Painter
- Yves Kobry
Born in 1987 to a father who studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and a mother who was an art historian, LU Hang（路航） was immersed in the artistic milieu from an early age. He chose to follow in his parents’ footsteps by enrolling at the School of Decorative Arts in Beijing before continuing his studies at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. After arriving in France in 2013, he further refined his training at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges. Lu Hang therefore begins his career as a young painter equipped with solid artistic training and technical mastery—something quite rare among artists of his generation. This is both an advantage and a challenge, as he must free himself from inherited references and virtuosity in order to discover his own path.
At the outset, he was influenced by Pop Art, particularly by Robert Rauschenberg. He drew his themes from mythology and socialist imagery—such as Lenin addressing a crowd, Khrushchev in a wheat field, young pioneers standing at attention, or a military parade. These scenes were rendered in a graphic style with acidic colors, playing on the contrast between the realism of faces and postures and the blurring, erasure, drips, and superimpositions of paint. From the beginning, one finds in Lu Hang’s work a desire to subvert his subjects and an ironic rebellion against ideology, discipline, and the imagery of propaganda.
Gradually, he distanced himself from the realism associated with pop culture and adopted a neo-expressionist style in the wake of Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. While retaining a taste for large formats and harsh, clashing colors, the motif becomes simplified and purified; the form grows more synthetic, more abstract, and rougher in appearance. It appears against vast planes of color, sometimes almost monochrome—like a barely identifiable human head floating upon a wide red river. The figure is isolated, sometimes truncated, perceived in close-up, often accompanied by an animal, such as pigs destined for the slaughterhouse or a rabbit in a laboratory. The dog, a recurring theme in the artist’s work, functions as a symbol of domestication and training, to which human beings themselves are also subjected.
Each of his paintings carries symbolic value, yet the narrative is no longer descriptive or anecdotal; it becomes allusive. It leaves the viewer the task of guessing—or rather freely interpreting—the meaning of the work. The aim is no longer to subvert propaganda imagery through irony, but to stimulate reflection and imagination.
While Lu Hang’s work contains an element of denunciation and critique of the constraints imposed within certain communities, its message is not strictly political but rather universal and utopian in scope. It expresses the hope for a world and a society entirely free—where every form of subjugation, whether through ideology, religion, labor, or discipline, has disappeared; where human beings can flourish through creativity, shape their personalities freely, and live their lives without restraint.