Memory 2008-2009

These new works on canvas effect a perfect synthesis between the media of Chinese ink and oils. White paint on unprimed canvas functions in the opposite way from black Chinese ink on white paper, and yet it retains the ink's essential parameters: fluidity, and the visibility of the picture support forming an integral part of the composition and thus excluding all retouching. However it is photographs – the very opposite of the imprecise and the unfinished – that serve as a point of departure for Mingjun Luo's paintings and drawings: images marking out the course of her life from her childhood in China to the present day. Transposing these photographs into another medium, that of painting, she reproduces a reality based on fragments of her biography; but at the same time she cuts free of this reality, depersonalising it, distancing it, and creating a new reality accessible to all. For the object to take on an independent, universal reality, it must undergo a process of paring down, of effacement or, rather, of coding, the aim of which is to render the understanding of a document impossible to anyone who does not possess the (de)coding key. So something apparently contradictory is involved in Mingjun Luo's approach: a real effacement of the image on the canvas, together with a determination to make it, to a certain extent, comprehensible. But what exactly is to be decoded and made accessible to everyone? The Chinese context? The Western context? The artist's personal, biographical input? Yet isn't all this coded, ciphered in turn by a consciously chosen technique that leaves the viewer real freedom to project his or her own faces, landscapes, feelings and knowledge?