EXHIBITED:
Luo Zhongli: The Description of the Replaced, Exhibition Hall of Contemporary Art, Suzhou Museum, Suzhou, September 10 - October 20, 2011

ILLUSTRATED:
Luo Zhongli: The Description of the Replaced, Culture and Art Publishing House, Beijing, 2011, color illustrated, pp. 188-189

After “Father”, Luo Zhongli completed his graduation portfolio, the “Hometown” series, in 1982. These paintings depict the daily lives of the farmers in Daba Mountains, all of which originated from a large number of sketches he had made in the countryside, such as “Blow Dregs”, “Over the Threshold”, and “The Eavesdrop”. With simple skills, pure colors and the flavor of the countryside, he depicted a kind of natural and rustic simplicity of famers from the mountain area. His artistic expression turned from surrealism to domestic realism. These early creations, however, still remained in the line of succession of his artistic concepts and followed an academic realist language.

Luo’s painting style evolved from vernacular realism to expressionism, which was also the second phase of his artistic creation and a continuance of his first phase. Entering the 1990s, Luo began to change and develop personal language and style. He also experimented with his artistic language in order to discover a kind of style that was able to hold contemporary cultural characteristics and reflect Eastern aesthetics at the same time. His painting language gradually shifted from realism to deformation and exaggeration. He drew images of exaggerated and deformed farmers as well as unrestrained lines and colors, depicting the love and caring between the elderly and the youth, and the men and women of the Daba Mountains with common yet simple emotions. His modeling language in this phase was quite heavy, showing a kind of solid strength and beauty with rustic originality, while his vivid, subjective, and highlighted color contrasts contained the spirit of Chinese folk art and aesthetics. During this period, Luo’s brush was full of passion and began to reveal his masterly skills.

In the late 1990s, Luo began to use rough lines and original colors to express his rustic subjects with a half-abstract style. His powerful tone carried a kind of primitiveness. Covering the canvas with a black background, he applied his passionate, stunning, and extremely modern colored lines over it. The composition was dynamic. Humans and animals were depicted with the elements extracted from folk art, such as paper cutting, New Year pictures, woodcut paintings, wood carving, stone carving, and totems. This was the third phase of Luo’s artistic creation: contemporary expressionism. However, the focus was still on humanistic concern, elements of Chinese traditional folk art, and modern and contemporary artistic concepts under globalization. He once said, “My style has undergone the baptism of Western modern art, my study on Western modern and contemporary art, and my return to Chinese backdrop and traditional culture. After I distinguished the difference between the East and the West, my distinctive and unique personal style began to take shape.”

Created in 2005, “Shadow” was created during Luo’s third phase. He still chose Daba villagers, his favorite medium, as the subject of this painting. However, there was a big change in his expression and skill. Compared with his works created in the 1990s, the picture of this painting no longer shows a graphic environment and background or a realistic depiction of the characters. The canvas was first painted in black. Then, the artist applied intertwining, parallel, and rough colored lines as the background and used powerful lines with shades closer to primary colors to sketch the profiles of the characters. The composition was more dynamic while and application of lines and color was rather intense. Colorful and rich elements of Chinese folk art were blended in its composition, shapes, and colors, which were also characteristic to his artistic style during this phase.

“Shadow” depicts a dull night of a rural family in the Daba Mountains. A couple is playing with hand shadows under the light. Against the light, their gestures reflect the shadows of their dogs. Upon seeing the reflections, the dogs surrounding the couple bark at and jump toward their masters one by one. The child is so frightened that he throws himself into the arms of his father. With these images, the painting vividly shows a lively scene of a rural family.

Luo created the “Father” and the “Hometown” series, which initiated the vernacular style of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in the 1980s. He also recorded his life as an artist and his inner feelings during this time. As a creative artist, Luo has not been affected by the fame of his renowned piece, “Father”. Instead, he chooses to continuously challenge himself and adhere to innovation and change.