Tigress, Tigress

4 June - 3 July 2021
BBA Gallery, Berlin

Curation with Renata Kudlacek
Exhibition Text: Nele Ouwens
Photography: Rick Schubert

Thwarting the ‘Made in China’ mass production mode through her employment of traditional Chinese craftsmanship, artist Ming Lu creates small, valuable editions of contemporary fine art. Her artworks are produced in a variety of media such as porcelain sculptures, embroideries, fine art prints and soft sculptures.

Born and raised in China and studying at The Royal College of Art in London, Ming Lu is now living in Berlin. Ming Lu has won the BBA Artist Prize in 2020 and is a new represented artist of the gallery. She works closely with small workshops in China to bring her ideas to life, humorously employing symbols and figures from myths, legends, prehistorical culture, and from her own biography. Ming Lu’s works reflect her cultural identity, which combines an enduring attachment to China, the country of her birth, to that of a growing relationship with her new home of Europe.

Ming Lu’s metaphorical use of everyday objects is a typical approach for the artist; her works often veer between abstraction and literalness, the familiar and the uncanny, the absurdity and gravity.

The soft sculptures of the ‘Tigress’ series are the artist’s personal interpretation of traditional Chinese tiger pillows that are widely given to babies as a toy, a token of love, a wish for a long life and to protect and guard the child. These pillows are all made by hand, usually by members of the family. Ming Lu’s works transcend the routine fabric pattern of the toys; the contents of the tigress’ bodies ­– that have a connection to the artist childhood in the 90‘s in China – convey a sense of nostalgia. The artist owned one herself and lost it when she was young.

‘Materialistic life’ is a series of nine embroideries depicting familiar objects. The shapes of the objects are filled with hovering golden threads that reflect light in the directions of the threads, giving the initial flat image plane a three-dimensional illusion. Historically the threads are made with real gold, and are used in decorative figures on Emperors' clothes such as dragons, a phoenix or other divine animals. The artist adopts the same technique here, portraying industrially produced and everyday items and therefore ironically turns them into objects of luxury.

Ming Lu’s porcelain sculptures play with decorative and meaningful aspects reflecting both everyday and historical culture. Her porcelain cubes turn supportive, decorative patterns into the main characters of the works. The intertwined branches and flowers are commonly meant to represent endless vitality. Her porcelain ducks reference the most popular Chinese dish and her porcelain head reflects the artist’s thoughts and personal conversations.

Drawing on heritage, cross-cultural dynamics and personal reference, the artist creates dense vividly-coloured fine art prints that challenge perceptual habits and representation of ritual objects. Mainly focusing on imaginative animals from historical vessels, Ming Lu gives them various layered surfaces including pure colour planes, decorative fabric ornaments, freely painted patterns, calligraphy and symbols; playfully transforming the materiality of these once functional yet now ‘functionless’ museum items. Reflecting on the collective memory and the original presentation of power and belief, the traditional visual language combined with the artist’s strong personal expression, varies between powerful and joyful, timeless and contemporary.

The exhibition also includes the artist's first works with Luodian, originally a decorative handicraft technique with use of various shells in Chinese lacquerware, in her works reflecting post-industrial life. The latest addition to Ming Lu's creative work is a series of digital artworks called `The young pioneers’ which can be bought and collected as NFT’s on the blockchain.