Tu es je suis — Luo Mingjun

Mingjun Luo – Recent Works

Delicate twigs and individual leaves float – passages of light within the dense, warm black of a charcoal drawing. They are depicted with great precision, but isolated from any real context. Like individual images from a long journey, they stand clearly before our eyes when we think about them, although we can never fit them back into their proper place in the grand puzzle of life. Do you still recall: These trees? This enchanting garden? But where was that again?

Mingjun Luo’s work revolves around the ephemerality of memory. With technical brilliance and a deep artistic sensibility, she traces the images which we internalise from life and from which we then shape our mental lives. She became famous with works painted so delicately that it seemed their greys might disappear into the untreated canvas at any moment. In her most recent pictures, Mingjun Luo has been working with the deep black of charcoal, but also with something that had long disappeared from her work: colour.

A little twig from a magnolia, for example, a bud just about to blossom, stands before a watery-blue, approximate background. Mingjun Luo was inspired by a magnolia outside her studio window: a twig falling out of life and into art. In the painting the twig appears with all the detailed accuracy of a photograph but is nonetheless other-worldly. It has brought a little shadow with it, which lies beneath it. It nonetheless appears somewhat lost within the vague blue that surrounds it. When Mingjun Luo paints plants, they seem to float. They are not rooted – like the artist herself, who was born in China, has lived in Switzerland for many years and always finds herself standing between two worlds to some extent.

Mingjun Luo has the eye of a traveller. Her eye sees a great deal, the small, the unspectacular, that which remains invisible for the eye of the native, dulled by familiarity. Mingjun Luo’s eye is an attentive one, and it also illuminates what lies inside of her, particularly when she – a woman between worlds – sets out on an actual voyage.

In the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa, Mingjun Luo discovered luxuriant gardens and a grotto with strangely shaped stones of uncertain significance. The artist responded to all this with two-dimensional abstractions, which take up the colours of the vegetation and the forms of the enigmatic stones. In India she discovered shrines carved in stone, which she recorded in a series of drawings. It is not known who created these artworks. The names of their sculptors have sunk beneath the flowing waters of time. How fleeting a name, a human life, is in comparison to a stone sculpture. Mingjun Luo has illustrated these thoughts by painting over her own signature beneath the drawings – in tones reminiscent of India’s abundant colour.

Finally the traveller, the observer, has created images of herself. Mingjun Luo has painted herself twice, during the day and at night, in faint and dark shades of blue. Each of these large-format paintings depict the artist from behind. She walks along in front of her viewers, perhaps also away from them, into the light or into the night – into the distance, an open space, towards new horizons – and sees what we do not yet see.

Alice Henkes, July 2023