Lu Hao. Shooting 10000 Arrows All at Once ( de | cn )
Galerie Urs Meile Beijing - Lucerne, 2007-04-13 - 2007-05-19
The strap of the crossbow hangs loose, innumerable arrows have been shot, the belligerent act of destruction appears arrested in an advanced state.
In his installation Shooting 10000 Arrows All at Once (2007), Beijing artist Lu Hao (b. 1969) takes us into a space between times. To create the work, the artist has reconstructed a launching platform mounted with a crossbow, a bulky contraption of the type used from the early empires well into the Ming and Manchu dynasties. Emphasizing the virtual dimension of this imitation battle weapon, only the chassis is made of wood, while the crossbow device is made of transparent Plexiglas. It is located near the entrance of the exhibition room, and there are hundreds of wooden arrows stuck in the diagonally opposite walls. This suggests an attack that is already over. The metal arrowheads have sunk themselves into models of traditional Beijing courtyard houses.
What is left of the time-honored, daily life of Beijing when the old urban infrastructure is quickly being obliterated and replaced by 'international style' high-rise skylines?
How long can the images in our memory resist factual destruction? The installation 2006 New Visual Acuity Chart for General Use (2007), also included in this exhibition, says it loud and clear. Here, the visitor enters a room which displays a dozen fluorescent light boxes in various sizes and colors, featuring the 'tumbling E' which is common in optometrists' offices all over the world. The optotypes in Lu Hao's pieces, however, are made up of scaled-down banknotes of international currencies. It is the 'money vision' that has prevailed.
Lu Hao's works have been shown in numerous international exhibitions and biennials ever since the late 1990s. A major motor of his creative work is his strong identification with his native town Beijing. With superior imperturbability, Lu Hao probes the concrete and the conceptual rubble fields that have been shaping the face of the Chinese mega-city as well as the modernization urge that dominates it. His most well-known statement against oblivion, against the gradual vanishing of the traditional Beijing hutong alleyways, is the model-type installation Beijing Welcomes You (2001). However, it is not a representation of the real city center. By replicating the old-style buildings at the scale of 1:200, but the more recent ones at 1:600 or 1:700, the artist lets his wishful thinking take the place of actual reality.
In his drawings, Lu Hao explores the atmospheric impact of ideologically connoted buildings such as Beijing's National Art Gallery, the Great Hall of the People and the entrance to the Forbidden City. But it is above all the Plexiglas objects that have become this artist's unmistakable signature. On the one hand, these works are characterized by the meticulousness of an architect and by their almost aseptically cold modeling material, Plexiglas. On the other, Lu Hao animates his transparent 'sculptures' with flowers, birds, insects and fish, all of which are also popular motifs in traditional Chinese painting. Through this interaction of highly antithetical materials and forms, the artist succeeds in walking an aesthetic tightrope: he manages to do justice both to his responsibility as a witness of his time and to his love of Chinese traditional fine art. He clearly rejects cynical approaches à la "Political Pop," just as he does not condone emulating the examples of Western art.
Lu Hao's most recent piece, Shooting 10000 Arrows All at Once, not only puts into focus the currently endangered relics of the traditional Chinese lifestyle, it also opens our eyes to rather elusive historical dimensions - quite beyond China, in fact. While in his work Construction Device (2002), the agent of demolishment was the shovel of an excavator, this time we are confronted with a piece of ancient weaponry, used during the early dynasties. In Shooting 10000 Arrows All at Once, the scenario of violent appropriation of territory, devastation of cultural assets and the ideologically conditioned development of new environments is visualized as a timeless phenomenon of human existence.
Translation: Werner Richter
