Chinese artist Luo Zhongli is considered one of the country's leading realist painters. The artist is best known for portraits of people living in harsh conditions in rural southwestern China. Yet his most renowned work is one of his earliest paintings, entitled Father (1980) featuring the wrinkled face of an old farmer holding a bowl. Since the mid-1980s, the artist has exhibited in numerous cities around the world, including Chicago, France, Taipei Sidney, Paris, and Hong Kong. Today the artist's work is held in several international collections, such as the Shanghai Art Museum, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, and the Singapore Art Museum, to name a few.
The Artist's Education
Luo Zhongli was born in Chongqing, China, in 1948. After graduating from the Senior High School of Sichuan Fine Art Institute in 1968, he began working in an iron factory. The artist graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1982, where he studied oil painting. He traveled to Belgium, where he entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1986 he graduated with MFA in Oil Painting. While still a student, he had his first solo show in 1984 in Brussels and a year later in Cambridge, MA.
As a young man, by order of the Chinese government, he was one of the millions of city children who had to move to a rural area and get re-educated by the rural farmers. The order came in an effort to prevent any possibility of students rebelling against the communist regime. After graduating high school, Zhongli lived in the rural Daba mountain region for ten years. It was here that he met the men who became the inspiration for painting Father (1980).
Art For The People
For Zhongli, art is not a mere reflection of life. Instead 'art should be entrenched in life." With a career spanning almost 40 years, the artist has always been inspired by the reality of human nature and love. The artist made a name for himself when he produced Father. At the time in China, large-scale portraits customary featured state leaders and renowned people, yet the artist decided to depict a no-name farmer from the rural countryside. The man's wrinkled face spoke about the harsh life, so different from what propaganda posters showed. Instead of the happy, healthy man living in abundance in his village, Chinese people saw the grim reality behind all the propaganda for the first time. Zhongli said:
At that time, artists would usually only paint celebrities such as state leaders on that large a scale, but I dedicated that space to a farmer, symbolizing the commencement of the time of the people.
Luo Zhongli's Exhibitions
Over the years, Luo changed his style from realistic to the folk mannerist style, and finally, he fused the aesthetics of two-dimensional paintings with three-dimensional sculptures. In 2022 Tang Contemporary Art Hong Kong organized a large retrospective of the artist's career entitled Luo Zhongli: Back To The Beginning Retrospective Exhibition 1965-2022. Luo Zhongli lives in Chongqing, China, where he works as a professor at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.
Негізгі бет Luo Zhongli
Пікірлер