Appreciation of Luo Min's Works

Curator Huang Du.

Who the hell is Luo Min? She is a respected soldier and a female painter who works silently. The charm of Luo Min's painting lies in that she expresses her life experience and artistic experience with highly personalized painting language, that is, she interprets her personal feelings and visual connotations hidden in things with skillful brushwork and gorgeous colors. Luo Min's paintings have a wide range of subjects, from colorful flowers and trees to complex characters, from the rigorous and delicate life of female soldiers in the army to colorful Tibetan portraits, to immature and lively children, and so on. She chose these daily and simple images as the object of description and analysis, which not only explained the essence of life aesthetics, but also showed the visual beauty of painting.

Different from other military painters' realistic "hero" narration and popular paintings full of commercial flavor today, Luo Min is obsessed with his own aesthetic judgment and artistic belief, and prefers to observe the micro-world. While respecting the objective images, he gave full play to his personal subjective expression and created a unique form of beauty in painting by relying on casual brushstrokes and rigorous modeling. Painters have no intention of restoring the objective world, but use these images to create and express a world of self-knowledge and analysis. From the perspective of structuralism, the meaning of any artistic symbol comes from its relationship with other symbols, especially from its contrast or opposition with other symbols. In other words, an important part of the meaning of painting is expressed through the opposition of formal symbols in painting. In any case, Luo Min's paintings weave a metaphysical visual symbol by abstracting, filtering and refining daily life and its representation. It is with the help of the interpretation of the ever-changing details in daily life that the painter expresses his personal attitude and viewpoint and analyzes the time and significance of this life entity. In the series of "potted flowers", although she depicts the instantaneous static state of flowers and plants, it implies the time and existence of life. However, the expression of flowers blooming, withering and withering conveys another analysis path of the painter. In such a fuzzy and chaotic world, although flowers and trees grow, extend, circulate and disappear, she tries to avoid objective reappearance in her paintings, but creates a sense of indifference and solemn atmosphere with dignified strokes and shiny colors. This highly anthropomorphic potted flower contains the painter's proud character. Nevertheless, this frozen image finally shows an abstract time scale: there is neither lost time nor recovered time, only there is no past and future time, that is, painting has created its own time.

At the same time, in addition to clearly expressing the concepts of time and existence in his paintings, Luo Min also used "potted flowers" as a way to release his feelings, although these flowers did not clearly show anything, but only expressed a metaphor of life consciousness. However, as we all know, in realistic painting, every detail it reproduces is meaningful, but Luo Min did not completely follow this artistic idea, that is, he did not treat painting as an established fact, but opened the painting language, which caused many ambiguities-it can not only refer to the consciousness of life itself, but also reflect people's melancholy, loneliness, anxiety and sad mental state. In this sense, the audience is not looking at something directly, but the concrete image of something, which includes the author's subjective perspective and personal color. The reason why his paintings are appropriate lies in leaving the audience free to imagine, think and judge, and they can experience, interpret, interpret and show the connotation and significance of paintings from different perspectives.

In his works Red Pomegranate and Blue Pomegranate, Luo Min skillfully blended the lens elements of photography and movies into the painting language, aiming at transforming the formal structure of painting itself. Specifically, she regards the relationship between painting, photography and film as a neutral language way, which improves the painting language and makes the boundaries of painting different and changeable. It is worth noting that these two works are almost monochromatic red and blue as a whole, which both imply people's subjective will. In these two works, Luo Min magnified the cracked pomegranate partially, and portrayed the pomegranate seeds so crystal clear, so rich in texture, so fragile and fragile, giving people the feeling of being entangled for a lifetime, especially the overall red or blue tone strengthened and rendered the visual stimulation and shock, suggesting some artificial control behavior. Generally speaking, the painter's intention to give information often goes against or deviates from the audience's understanding of information. Perhaps it is easier for the audience to understand the meaning of human-related violence and pleasure from the information conveyed in her two works: it not only implies human violence, but also shows the beauty of the object itself. However, the form and concept of Luo Min's paintings are more about thinking about violence. There are multiple metaphors about violence in her paintings, which is a controversial topic. In the eyes of critics, there is a certain distance between explanation and judgment, because no rational explanation can explain emotional preference. Perhaps Luo Min's paintings just pour out rational analysis from the artist's intuition and sensibility, which is a Baudrillard-style expression of violence, that is, violent images and the violence suffered by images. Summarized and prompted from three aspects: First, offensive and compulsory violence. One is gentle, admonishing and comforting soft violence. One is visual media violence related to images and information.

In other still life paintings, whether it is the firmness of cactus, the beauty of Clivia or the enchanting of chaotic grass, Luo Min takes these plant states as the subjective description objects, from which he can feel the beauty of his life. Her painting "I can hear the heartbeat of the earth in silence" embodies this aesthetic feature, which is obviously related to the elegant realm of traditional literati painting in China and the aesthetics of Zen painting. When expressing the life state with dried flowers or fresh flowers and plants, she emphasizes the naturalness of subjective consciousness. Whether it is the image of dry flowers and light green, or orchids or other flowers overlooking flowerpots, dark green leaves are outlined with heavy and powerful strokes, which fully expresses a pure experience of "forgetting things" and "integrating subject and object". On the other hand, the image of the picture and the poetic theme are skillfully handled by the painter as a complementary relationship. In this work, Luo Min's free and loose brushwork combined with the materiality of oil painting pigments is just like the dry brush in traditional painting and calligraphy, which is both natural and natural. Its simple painting style directly brings people closer to the daily world, that is, the aesthetic relationship between China people and flowers and plants. Even today, China people continue to use this cultural tradition in their daily lives, regarding flowers and plants as a whole with themselves. Planting flowers and plants gives consideration to beauty and health. People associate plants with their own way of life in daily life. Planting flowers and plants has become a way of keeping in good health for China people, and it is also a psychological "healing" effect. It has its gorgeous style, which makes the natural decoration more beautiful and gives people beautiful visual enjoyment. It can also adjust people's lifestyle, enhance personal aesthetic taste, and enhance people's health, scientific knowledge and personal cultivation. Therefore, it is through this concept of Zen painting that Luo Min untied and expressed the visual philosophy and psychological comfort of "the unity of subject and object".

As a female painter, Luo Min injected the maternal feelings in the subconscious into the media and means of painting expression, and extended the accumulation of such feelings to the microcosmic world of family, life, work, women and children. Especially in the process of observing children's living habits, Luo Min fully demonstrated her artistic intuition and talent in her series of works "Swimming Class" and "The Other Side". She grasped the main features of children and swimming pools, and summarized them with freehand brushwork-in the rippling blue pool water, she described children as various swimming movements or postures with big brush strokes, and swam in the clear and transparent swimming pool, which fully reproduced them. She reconstructed color, space and body into the perceptual logic "rhythm" of her painting. She even boldly gave up the idea of using oil paints to represent the blue swimming pool in several other "swimming" works, only slightly rippling on the child's body, implying the existence of water by leaving a large blank in the picture, just like the image expression in the Beijing opera "Sanchakou". Therefore, she deliberately cut out the unnecessary parts of the painting and shaped them into clear and simple formal language, thus adding a sense of sculpture and empty inspiration to the picture. At the same time, we also experience from the dynamic pictures that although naughty children are free to play and swim, their "bodies" are placed in a space where freedom and restriction are intertwined. In this relationship, Luo Min not only regards the contrast between space and body as the tension of visual expression, but also implicitly implies the binary opposition world with poetic painting language: liveliness and obedience, freedom and restraint.

Luo Min's military experience turned her understanding of art into her interest and expression of micro-state, and she thought about the spirit of contemporary soldiers entering a new era. Because of her female identity, she closely observed the inner activities and external representations of female soldiers. The life of female soldiers in the army is not as boring and monotonous as others think, but has a little-known vivid side, and almost every detail is unforgettable. In the painting "The Little Girl in the New Barracks", she did not portray the recruits in a uniform way like other painters. Instead, from a vivid, natural and human point of view, she vividly captured the relaxed and lively mood of female soldiers waiting in line after taking a shower, wet hair, pink faces or wearing green bath towels. Or make up in front of the mirror, or look back at the moment. This is a unique perspective. She boldly shows and displays the bright colors of daily necessities full of life breath (red slippers, yellow washbasin, green towel), which sets off the cheerful atmosphere of the picture. She vividly depicts the image characteristics of new female soldiers, such as youth, romance, vigor, nature, innocence, vitality, frankness and so on.

Different from the symbolism advocated by popular painting, Luo Min did not go to the dogma of painting, but took the images of daily life as the core of creation, trying to rediscover the ontology and freedom of painting. In other words, starting from painting itself and daily life, this is the entrance for her to open the possibility of painting. It is not difficult to understand why the painter turned from grand historical reality narration to dull daily life. Luo Min simplified and enlarged his daily life, seemingly without a bright and grand narrative posture, but with very rational thinking and analysis. In this sketch, she reveals the meanings of various symbols behind daily life in the form of painting-collectivity, memory, individuality, life, time, existence, life, spirit and interest. Therefore, in Luo Min's view, although contemporary painting no longer follows linear visual logic, but is constantly absorbed, borrowed, collaged and mixed, she does not follow the trend, but believes in her artistic intuition, sticks to her beliefs, and pays attention to and analyzes the relationship between the immanence of painting itself and the micro-world. She understands today's painting as a visual medium, which includes the analysis of many cultural symbols: it is not only a reorganization of the order of things, but also a visual concept, a solidified movement, a spiritual illustration, a realistic representation and an analysis of imagination. Therefore, on the basis of realistic methodology, Luo Min skillfully combined the new methods of photography and film as the weight of expression, which led to the change of painting language. Her paintings convey a clear concept: dialogue with life and life. Through the subjective deconstruction and coding of various objects in daily life, she established her own unique painting language and personality style. The expression of her personality style belongs to her as much as her body. Therefore, if we appreciate Luo Min's paintings carefully, we can experience her artistic temperament of combining rigidity with softness.