A great artist who has been buried away, an extremely creative and twisted talent. He possesses a type of natural talent: folk and ethnic art have been melded together with contemporary art to a high degree.
Li Xiaoshan
Luo Xu and his 'Earth Nest'
Li Xiaoshan
Late last summer while I was in Kunming, Ye Yongqing and Mao Xuhui told me of a 'freak' named Luo Xu. They used many adjectives, so I had a preconceived idea of what I was to expect before we met. On first meeting him, I didn't see anything particularly special, just a dark skinny man, about my age, shorter than myself by about half a head. He didn't talk too much or too little; he was like many other artists I had met before, dubbed 'strange' yet not strange - I was thinking that maybe after I got to know him, his 'strangeness' would slowly start to stick out like the fox's tail.
In the end, after coming to know some of the thoughts harbored by this 'freak', I couldn't help but feel a deep respect for him. I remember blurting out at the time, "such a big chunk of land, all these strange buildings, all these creative works and all these dogs, are they all yours?" To be honest, I had never thought that such an artist existed in China, one that could build a 'building structure' spanning several thousand square meters without any understanding of architecture. This 'structure' was filled with his innumerable creative works: sculptures, paintings, digital works... I simply couldn't believe that one man could possess so much spiritual and physical power. Aside from eating and shitting, he would have to work non-stop, without rest, or how could he do so much?
When talking about his 'building', Luo Xu is a bit bashful, pointing out that he knows absolutely nothing about architecture, but immediately adding that after an American architect visited the 'Earth Nest', he pointed to the skyscrapers of Kunming in the distance, saying that in the event of an earthquake, all of those buildings would collapse, while the 'Earth Nest' would stand firm. This shows that though the 'Earth Nest' was built without accurate calculations or rigid design, there is a definite intuitive insight into the laws of mechanics built into it. When looking at it from the outside, these clusters of strange breast-shaped hovels are hard to associate with a word like 'residence'; it is much more suggestive of an aboriginal ritual ground or giant kilns. I never exactly counted the number of randomly scattered and misshapen 'breasts', I was mostly thinking of how to solve the issues of air and lighting. Standing several dozen meters high, this cluster of random shapes and sizes is just incomprehensible, what kind of building is this?! But when I went inside, all of these issues drifted away like smoke from a dead fire, and I instantly came to like this place - the stone pillars, vaulted walls, granite floors, passageways in all directions and high parabolic ceilings... the issues of circulation and lighting are perfectly solved and taken advantage of. This place makes one suspect that they are standing in a medieval castle in the dreamtime of fairytales... I don't want to describe the 'Earth Nest' too much, because its oddness goes beyond that which can be described in words. I'll just say that it is the oddest most peculiar building that stands today. In the beginning, its owner, without any blueprints or plans, led a group of laborers with his long bamboo pole to follow the uneven terrain, erecting buildings wherever his pole pointed...
Luo Xu is even more interested in sculpture. Inside the 'Earth Nest', it is hard to really tell how many works, finished or half done, that he has hammered out, plasters, ceramics, oil paints, pictures, fiberglass... I saw piles and piles of the remains of smashed works; it was a truly shocking quantity. Luo Xu's sculptures basically expanded further the road of modernism; the shape and content are quite unified, containing many references to the human condition, and full of the creator's thoughts and impressions. The methods appear to be quite purist, and the spirit the works express is highly individualized. Luo Xu's image style has already taken a definite shape. The female leg is his favorite material. Whether one or many, red or white, the legs are the window through which Luo Xu looks at art and life. Some of the other works are likewise intertwined with sex. Of course, he has also done some fired pottery productions of immense scale. As he explains it, he is just the director, and it is just like conducting an orchestra. The subject matter certainly does not decide an artist's entire consciousness, but there is a bit of conceptual distance when he is viewed against the entire front lines of contemporary art. His individual isolation makes him great, but it also causes him to be lost. I am not talking about his infatuation with folkways and customs, but his creative conception. This is a profound and abstruse thing, but it has an index - whether or not it contains the qualities of the front line.
Without a doubt, Luo Xu is a great artist who has been buried away, an extremely creative and twisted talent. He possesses a type of natural talent: folk and ethnic art have been melded together with contemporary art to a high degree. When I first became acquainted with him, I was struck with a strong notion that I wanted to introduce him to more art lovers, more people who love life and more who understand life.
