Refusing completion, remaining nomadic.
Liu Sichuan
luhang 路航 — Untitled 15, 2024 — Oil on canvas, 30 × 50 cm (triptych)
In our interview with the artist LU Hang（路航）, we invited him to speak about the topic of “the evolution of pictorial language.” What he ultimately delivered was an unusually complete and profound text. It was no longer simply an answer to a question, but rather a deep inquiry and expression of his own visual language and mode of existence. In this self-reflection, Lu Hang does not remain at the surface level of works, techniques, or styles. Instead, he chooses to approach the issue from a more fundamental perspective: how does he face a world that is excessively narrated and constantly drifting? How does he maintain a belief in and exploration of the language of painting amid the disintegration and reorganization of images? This is not an artistic position that can be easily summarized as a “concept” or a “stance,” but rather a record of a creator’s continuous process of self-renewal, self-negation, and self-generation. For a young artist still in the process of growth, such a candid and reflective expression is particularly rare. For this reason, we have decided to publish this text—originally written as a response within the interview—independently. This reflection, which does not remain on the surface of painting, presents the artist’s current creative state of mind and invites us to pause and listen.
The evolution of pictorial language unfolds naturally alongside the evolution of an artist’s life experience and personality. At certain moments, an artist suddenly realizes something, understands something clearly. When a person changes, the language of art also changes. In this era, it seems increasingly difficult to discern what is sincere and what is worthy of trust. When I look at the surrounding world with such doubts, I often feel as if I am living within an illusion constructed by appearances. It does not present itself as some kind of conspiracy, but rather resembles a subtle collective theater—layer upon layer of habits accumulated over time. When one looks more closely, rough logic, uncontrolled emotions, repetitive language, and hidden violence gradually emerge. Narratives that once seemed firm begin to tremble and eventually collapse into scattered fragments.
I began to question those values and beliefs that are taken for granted. Many of them are not naturally formed but are products of certain mechanisms—we are guided to believe, trained to persist. Yet behind such persistence there may be neither truth nor a choice that truly belongs to oneself. This led me to wonder whether it is meaningful to continue investing energy in these endless entanglements. I therefore stopped trying to clarify everything that has been artificially obscured and stopped rushing to respond to fabricated questions. This seemed to be a way of approaching something closer to reality. I try to preserve a sense of distance, a freedom from assimilation, even if it is only a small space. I choose not to participate excessively, not to comply, yet also not to negate lightly. Toward the falseness and boredom that repeat themselves day after day, I have learned to watch them pass gently—acknowledging their existence, keeping a distance without deliberately confronting them, no longer obsessing over answers, and maintaining a certain sense of play.
luhang 路航 —Untitled 23, 2024 — Oil on canvas, 165 × 145 cm
Within this context, I no longer believe that images possess a clear beginning or end. In the painting they are constantly broken apart, distorted, and drifting, becoming fragments of perception suspended between reality and unreality. I do not pursue extremity or completeness. Instead, I am interested in the “in-between state” that exists among images—a condition that is unstable and uncertain yet full of power. These images remain connected to reality, yet they may derail at any moment, maintaining a strange link between rupture and generation. This is not a choice between affirmation and negation, but a search for a continuously vibrating tension between the two. I need to “do something” among these fragments, allowing them to generate something new, allowing the image to remain nomadic, restless, leaving traces of sensation, and thus maintaining a sense of the reality of existence and the independence of images.
luhang 路航 —Untitled 13, 2024 — Oil on canvas, 30 × 50 cm; 50 × 35 cm; 35 × 50 cm
For me, painting is a process of constant becoming. It does not depend on the establishment of entities or meanings, nor does it pursue “completion.” Instead, it is an open and unstable mode of presentation—a constellation composed of impulse, contingency, and uncertainty that responds to the complexity of reality through constantly shifting forms. Once I became aware of the unreliability of meaning itself, I no longer regarded painting as the presentation of images, but as an action carried by “language itself” within flowing images. It is both a visual process of generation and a bodily operation with an attitude—direct, rough, and violent, yet also sincere, playful, and decentralized. This attitude leads me back to the directness and primitivity of painting, back to bodily instinct and animality, allowing materials, lines, emotions, and ideas to collide, drift, displace, and reorganize freely within two-dimensional space. Painting is no longer a simulation of reality, nor the endpoint of meaning. It becomes a practice of intervening in perception, an action that disturbs the visual system, like fire piercing darkness or a stone striking water and sending ripples outward. What it triggers is not information but sensory experience, activating the viewer’s bodily and emotional responses. I oppose the idea that painting should carry a clear narrative or symbolic task, yet I also refuse the total emptiness of nihilism. What I explore is a state of fissure between “non-meaning” and “reconstruction”—seeking a sense of existence in flux as images continuously generate, collapse, and recombine. This unstable “certainty” is closer to reality than any established meaning. Painting thus becomes a continuously unfolding field, not a result but an endless process of becoming—an open response to the world and to one’s own experience.
luhang 路航 —Untitled 18, 2024 — Oil on canvas, 33 × 46.5 cm; 38 × 49 cm; 32.5 × 45.5 cm
Painting can become a “dream-catching net”—using materials, perception, language, action, and emotion to capture those sensations and experiences that cannot be fully articulated, briefly fixing them within the image. In this way, painting is no longer a result but a continuously unfolding process, a dynamic mode of existence, and a double testimony to the world and to the self. Amid the absurdity jointly constructed by language, reality, and narrative, I no longer seek a center or a final truth. Instead, I choose to deterritorialize, turn, escape, and generate continuously within perception, images, bodily action, and the language of painting. I want to capture something that carries the qualities of the present “state” or even of the future—something drifting that has not yet been named but can already be sensed in advance. Rather than remaining trapped in obsessions, I no longer cling to the immediate present, nor am I confined by the past. I look toward the future, anticipating the approach of those uncertain things that have not yet arrived, and hoping that they may come sooner.