Clara Lu Artist’s exhibit
Amorphous #1
This booklet was made possible by; Host Sun Gallery Sponsor Asia Art Fund Curator Sun Liangang SVA Professor Steve DeFrank Photographer Madam Yu
Sun Gallery sunartcenterny@gmail.com Clara Lu claralu.weebly.com clarajlu@gmail.com
Clara Lu Artist’s exhibit August 1 – 22, 2014 Reception Fri August 1st, 2014, 2pm Sun Gallery Trump Tower 721 5th Ave Suite 35D New York, NY 10022 sunartcenterny@gmail.com
SVA professor Steve DeFrank, my mentor and professor What does it mean to make figurative work in New York today? What is like to be a first generation Chinese American living, working and studying in New York, a city that is exhilarating and challenging? New York is a place on the map and a state a mind. The city allows for risks and chances and opportunities. Clara Lu is a New Yorker. She is making her way in this crazy maze of a city and in an art world where there are no rules, no guidebooks to help chart the waters. I look at her and see a young, energetic artist figuring out how to live and how to make a mark. “Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that’s why I made works of art. ” –Felix Gonzales-Torres Clara has an immense talent with an intellect to match. This is what comes to mind when I’m standing in front of Clara’s works. These works are the inner thoughts of an artist. To be an artist today, especially a painter, is one of the most radical things one could do. It’s figuring out how to draw faces through a group of glasses or heads squeezed into a light bulb. This is Alice in Wonderland and Clara is behind the looking glass reflecting her world back to the viewer. I wonder to myself how Clara makes isolation feel so universal. That seems like a funny contradiction; feeling alone, but alone together.
Working on Bulbs of Thought
Growing up, I was trained traditionally, learning the techniques of charcoal, pencil, and oil through still lives and master copies. I was then introduced to conceptual art, which opened so many doors and opportunities for expression. The change from purely technique-based still lives and master copies to conceptual art was personally a very hard transition. What started out as a small doodle about being contained and constrained by traditional techniques and media grew into the experimental playground for many of the pieces in this show. Each work in this show describes my thought progression during my transition. In each piece I took on a different obstacle and experimented with as many factors to loosen up my previously strict adherence to realism. All together, the works in this show represent a period of growth and transformation.
Amorphous #1 48 x 57 in Charcoal on paper
Amorphous #1 Amorphous #1 began from the idea of mirroring the way in which we experience emotions and ideas in a stream of consciousness. Created from pure intuition and “going with the flow”, Amorphous #1’s rendered faces dispersing and forming from one another are the focus of the piece. In order to maintain the focus and movement of the eye on the mass of faces, the background remains white and plain to suggest open, infinite space where this mass travels through constantly morphing and changing.
Binding Need 28 x 26 in Mixed media on canvas
Binding Need As an experimentation using components of everyday objects that people are intimately connected to because of technological consumption, Binding Need is an attempt to portray this obsession. Presently in the day to day lives of people across the world, consuming social media and technology is so ingrained into culture and society that it is close to impossible to imagine either of these without considering the way in which technology and social media has affected people’s lives; people now see, breathe, and think through social media and it has connected people in both good and bad ways.
Bulbs of Thought 48 x 36 in Oil on canvas
Bulbs of Thought Every person has his or her own thoughts, his or her own stream of consciousness. Using the the lightbulb as a motif often associated with ideas, Bulbs of Thought is a quirky illustration of the way people’s ideas would manifest in physical form; in each bulb is a person with different ideas and opinions.
Connection Lost 20 x 10 in Mixed media on canvas
Connection Lost Connection Lost builds on the motif of light bulbs, this time using them as a symbol of entrapment. While technology has pervaded society and has provided many benefits such as ease of communication and knowledge, it has also metaphorically trapped us within ourselves. Even with a plethora of knowledge and resources available online, through a push of a button, so many things have changed, for example the way in which people interact with one another. With applications such as Facebook and Twitter, social interactions have become less and less about spending time face to face, but instead being available to chat 24/7 online. Connection Lost explores the way in which people isolate themselves from one another despite being so ingrained in modern-day technology and resources.
Contain Yourself 20 x 24 in Mixed media on bristol
Contain Yourself Adding onto the idea of containers as a physical and mental barriers, Contain Yourself employs various media including collage, acrylic, graphite, charcoal, pastel, and even vellum to express the different kinds of obstacles people encounter. Oftentimes, these problems are hurdles people create themselves, obstructing themselves from the solution that is easily seen on the other side. Contain Yourself shows that these problems are all unique in their shape, size, and form, but they often result from when people don’t look at the situation as a whole and realize the solution is simple and easy.
Eenie Meenie Minie Mo 20 x 24 in Charcoal and pastel on bristol
Eenie Meenie Minie Mo Water is often labeled the source of life, and it truly is, without water life would be impossible. Water is also often referred to as a singular mass, but there are many different kinds of water, just as there are an infinite variety of life forms that came from water. Each glass of water in Eenie Meenie Minie Mo holds a unique body of ingredients and personalities, just like the way people are. Human bodies are 70% water, meaning that what is in our water and how we treat it is extremely influential to who we are and our own well being. Eenie Meenie Minie Mo is a take on how this idea would be visually presented.
Seal It 32 x 24 in Acrylic and paper on bristol
Seal It Society teaches people to filter and censor particular ideas and opinions. For better or for worse, certain phrases cannot be expressed in certain situations, ideas are repressed, or some ideas don’t even see the light of day. Censorship is an extremely controversial topic, especially when it comes to censoring the thoughts of others. However Seal It speaks on the censorship we enact on our own selves. In our day-to-day lives, there are countless situations where certain attitudes and personalities are put away because we deem then inappropriate. Seal It questions the kind of censorship we place on ourselves, whether this is the right thing to do and what kind of person we become to others if censorship is a constant habit. Seal It begs the question, who are we really after being filtered by all the standards of society?
What Are You Looking At? 40 x 24 in Pastel on bristol
What Are You Looking At? received a Scholastic Gold Key from the 2010 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
What Are You Looking At? Typical portraiture has always been of a sitter’s bust, with the head turned at a slight angle and the arms and hands posed in a regal way. What Are You Looking At? breaks from the norm and presents portraiture in an atypical way with the window of illusion coming from below the subject. The subjects are also actively engaging with the invisible barrier that separates viewer from subject, another atypical characteristic of the portraiture.
Wonder Works 37 x 24 in Mixed media on bristol
Wonder Works As another take on atypical portraiture, Wonder Works uses thread to experiment with the ideas of flat and three-dimensional illusions. In most works of two dimensional art, a window of illusion is created where tones, colors, and hues create a world of depth. Wonder Works includes thread, which in this case is used to draw objects to further aid the illusion of space and depth, but their own three dimensional quality on the surface of the paper bring the eyes back to the surface. The use of thread to create an illusion of depth and field that still calls attention to the surface and texture of thread layered upon thread is a very different approach to standard portraiture, hence the name Wonder Works.
My first solo exhibition during middle school
Meeting with the infamous Ai Wei Wei
Meeting with Wei Li Gang at his studio in Song Zhuang in Beijing
Sun Liangang and I at an Asia Art Fund lecture at the Harvard Club
Thanks for your support!