XIAO Lu, China

1962  Born in Hangzhou, China.

XIAO Lu has been an explosive force on the chinese art scene since the chinese New Year in 1989, when she went into the opening of China's first major public exhibition of contemporary art in Beijing's National Gallery of Art and fired two shots with a crisp loaded gun in her installatin Dialogue. Her action has beome historic not only because the exhibition was immediately closed, and the artist arrested and felt obliged to emigrate to Australia. But above all since it was interpreted by many as a vision, yes a prophecy of the students occupation of Tiananmen and the subsequent brutal repression. Xiao Lu’s artistic silence in Australia lasted, like Marcel Duchamp's, for fifteen years. When she returned to Beijing, her previous boyfriend had appropriated her action as his, telling everybody and the media that he who was the author. Something she quietly accepted because of her love, until she finally broke up. Art historians politicized interpretations of her works are of course natural. That her own intent with the two gunshot was a pure personal and symbolic settlement with a situation of abuse, does not make work the less important, something she is also very well describes in her autobiographical book Dialogue.

Gender issues and the self has been a recurring theme in Xiao Lu's work ever since Dialogue, such as Sperm (2006) about her failed attempts to find a sperm donor, but also Wedding in which she documented her fictional attempt to get married. Although Xiao Lu has never sought the scandal it has always come to her. As in Venice in 2013, where the exhibition Grand Canal at the Museo Diocesano, which her sister Xiao Ge curated was censored by the museum staff. They simply removed her artistic materials, the soil / mud she had been transported from her hometown of Hangzhou, with which she should cover her body and swim in the canal outside the museum in a purification process. The censoring forced her instead to do her action naked in Catholic museum. The scandal was a fact.

For more information pls visit XIAO Lu's website

Xiao Lu. Open-Closed. Guangzhou Live 4. 2014. Canton.