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Lu Chao | Black Box

Lu Chao | Black Box
Hadrien de Montferrand Gallery
11 March-8 April 2017

Hadrien de Montferrand Gallery is delighted to announce a solo show of Lu Chao entitled “Black Box” on March 11 featuring more than 10 recent works of the artist including oil paintings, works on paper and paintings on wood board. Following on the solo shows “Black Forest”, “Black Mirror” and “Black Light”, this is the fourth cooperation of the artist with the gallery. The artist uses painting to express feelings of mystery and strangeness.

“The faces in the painting are some strangers that I ran into in my memory. Every face can express an emotion, a story and each small-sized person is like different ways of opening the stories. Many unknown things in our life often attract me. The unknown is a beautiful state, like a black box of human being; you can know what is the ‘real’ in the black box. I try to express a sense of unknown and strangeness through the painting. It’s the strangeness that people feel about the world and about themselves. As Socrates has put it: ‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing.’ I would rather express an attitude of curiosity, of admiration and of reverence rather than setting up a correct answer in the painting. I hope that every viewer could see himself in my painting.”

In traditional Chinese culture, “black” is not a pleasant color. But in Lu Chao’s mind it is the richest and densest color. The present exhibition carries over the previous three shows’ title and themes by having “black” as its starting point and as its conclusion, as its simplest and most complex element. Therefore the artist hopes to continue exploring this system,and to investigate it in a persistent and meaningful manner. With regards to Lu Chao’s subjects, he operates a transition of his focus from “people” to the more general topic of “life”.

Worthy of mention is the fact that this exhibition features the first 10 meters long painting of the artist. Regardless of the pictorial dialectic or the subject of the works, they all possess a more meaningful content as well as a more open outlook than before, leaving a profound impression on the viewer.

We specially invited critic Sun Dongdong to interview Lu Chao. Sun Dongdong mentioned that “Lu Chao is a typical painter and a ‘historical’ person who narrates in an ambiguous way, although there is never a specific history in his paintings. As what he depicts, our historical feeling is a cycling life experience that can be encountered in certain scenes and transform into a general feeling of reality. Therefore, Lu Chao is obsessed with portraying crowds. For him, people in their plural form are closer to the reality of life. The so-called ‘reality’ suggests an order of human affairs. When Lu Chao introduces a natural barbarous state into his paintings, it means that he realizes the origin of modernity—we can say that the transformation of Lu Chao as a painter begins here, but the transformation doesn’t come from the painting itself, but because he has understood the meaning of illusion in a dialectical way.”

Born in 1988 in Shenyang, Lu Chao is a graduate from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and of the Royal Academy of Art in London. Lu Chao’s works are neither fashionable nor academic, they gracefully use a subtle technique to prompt a profound feeling of mystery and imagination. Received numerous supports and have been widely exhibited in galleries and institutions in China and abroad. Recent exhibitions held in London, Paris and Beijing were widely acclaimed including at Hadrien de Montferrand Gallery in Beijing, Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris, Rosenfeld Porcini Gallery in London, in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chengdu, the Today Art Museum, at Art Basel in Hong Kong, Art Chicago, Art Geneva, Art Brussels etc. He was recently nominated at the Saatchi New Sensation and the England’s Painter-Stianers Goron Luton awards among others. 

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