台北  采泥藝術
2019.03.02-04.14

Opening: 03.02 15:00
Forum: 03.23 15:00 陸先銘x龔卓軍x陳貺怡

台南  耘非凡美術館
2019.03.16-05.05

Presenter：龔卓軍
Opening: 03.24 15:00
Catalogue Launch & Forum：04.20 15:00 陸先銘x龔卓軍x陳貺怡

Modernology—LU Hsien-Ming’s Urban Thinking is the artist’s first collaboration with Chini Gallery, and will take place simultaneously at Remarkable Cultivation Art Gallery in Tainan and Chini Gallery in Taipei. Lu Hsien-Ming’s signature series, including the Bridge Series and the Figure Series, are featured in the exhibition at Remarkable Cultivation Art Gallery. Together, the painting series convey the artist’s critique of and reflection on the drastic impact on the environment and people’s living condition resulted from rapid social changes. Lu’s latest painting series, Old Trees Series, will be displayed at Chini Gallery. In the new series, the artist revisits the essence of life and reinterprets the environment to voice his ideal and value that human civilization and natural environment should co-exist in harmony. This series inherits and continues the artist’s thinking and representation of the urban environment. From these three series, viewers will perceive the artist’s evolving power and sensibility, which have become more self-effacing but exude a sense of warmth that resonates with something deep in everyone’s heart.

To think about Lu Hsien-Ming’s art through “modernology” is due to my understanding of “modernology” as both “the study of observations made through lingering on urban streets” and “an emerging study grown from a scorched land,” the combination of which represents how I feel about Lu’s painting and installation.… Lu’s painting and installation address the period of three decades after the lifting of martial law, during which construction sites, scaffoldings, bridges and viaducts started appearing in different corners of Taipei City and Taipei County; they belong to urban flâneurs who have lived in and through that era. Lu, as a painter immersed in modern living condition, is like a prince in disguise making rounds in the urban space resembling a mega construction site, and reveals an urbanscape of modernology—the study of modern living experiences.

－GONG Jow-Jiun, Associate Professor, Doctoral Program in Art Creation and Theory, TNNUA; Academic Chair of the Tainan Exhibition

Bridge Series

Lu Hsien-Ming creates a group of paintings featuring bridges and documenting urban changes. In this body of work, Lu uses bulky, coarse brushstrokes and a painting method of scraping and wiping to create a layered materiality reminiscent of that of civil engineered constructions. Such a materiality is cold and conveys a blunt sense of bulkiness found in these industrial constructions, which stand upright amidst a surrounding hinting at the dusk of industry. Both people and the sense of time are absent in these images composed of cold and even slightly restless colors, and the city is placed in an unpopulated, industrial setting. Ever since this series, Lu has used this realistic approach, mixed with expressive colors, to record the changes that this city has undergone.

－CUI Can-Can, Art Critic

Figures Series

Lu Hsien-Ming’s figure paintings center on marginal nobodies in society, who are trying to survive in life. The image is in dark and grayish tones with a monotonous, empty background; only those carefully delineated figures that are discontent with life occupy the images. In terms of form, he incorporates electronic scrolling text boards to display messages on the sides of the paintings, turning his works into semi-installations in the attempt to expand visual potentiality. Nevertheless, although the artist’s subject matter is the nobodies struggling for a livelihood in an unrestful society, such a social backdrop is replaced by emptiness…. What has usually caught the artist’s attention is this group of people coming from different background, beaten down by life, and give off a sense of being deserted and helplessness understood by most people.

－LEE Wei-Jing, Art Critic

Old Trees Series

Different from trees painted by other modern painters, the paintings in Lu Hsien-Ming’s new series in 2018, Old Trees Series, are given a blank, pure white background. This approach seems to echo how some contemporary artists perceive the world: they separate the ubiquitous media images from their individual historical background and see them as symbols essentially independent from any specific context to gain the freedom to reconstruct these symbols at will. Consequently, Lu’s tree is no longer a certain object on which one projects emotions, nor is it a representation of “the tree.” Like other urban elements converted into graphic symbols, it can also be arranged by the artist to compose an urban melody for a certain period, place and people.

－CHEN Kuang-Yi, Art Critic & Dean of College of Fine Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts