Cities Here and NowPaintings and Installation Works by Lu Hao |
| By Liew Wee Wen | |||||
Till October 25th, Singapore Art Museum  Singapore Art Museum presents ‘Cities Here and Now: Paintings and Installation Works by Lu Hao’, the first solo museum exhibition in Southeast Asia for the internationally renowned contemporary Chinese artist. This exhibition of close to 30 works is guest curated by Professor Wu Hung, Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at The University of Chicago. The different works in ‘Cities Here and Now’ are united through Lu’s perspectives on three issues confronting cosmopolitan cities worldwide: urban redevelopment, hyper-consumerism, and globalisation’s erosion of “local” culture and heritage. The exhibition includes the Flower, Bird, Insect, Fish series, which first brought Lu international attention and critical acclaim at the 1999 Venice Biennale. This series features four acrylic architectural models of buildings, which are signifiers of cultural grandeur and political authority in Beijing today. The artist conceptualised the hollow models as containers for live flowers, birds, grasshoppers and fish, where the cultivation of these are a traditional Beijing pastime. In the (dis)placement of the latter within the boundaries of the former, Lu sets up a contrast, an uneasy dialogue between the “local” cultural habits and urban redevelopment of his native city. This tense negotiation is continued in the 2008 Landscape Series paintings and the cast bronze sculpture, Tool of Construction. The former presents the subtle irresistibility of hyper-consumerism, depicting familiar products paraded colourfully on shopping racks. Like the urbanites, viewers are lulled into forgetting the domination of international brands in their visual and other living spaces. Comparatively, the latter’s savage representation of an excavator is a reminder of the hard, unyielding destruction that precedes a city’s long march to progress through urban redevelopment. ‘Cities Here and Now’ also includes other visually, and intellectually, arresting work, such as the 17-meter long handscroll, Landscape, a panorama of Shanghai Bund today, as well as the six-meter long vertical scroll couplet, Lovely Blossoms and Full Moon, depicting the biases and conflicts within mass media-created world realities.
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