French writer Michel Houellebecq writes in his first book “Extension du Domain de la Lutte: “I do not like this world. I do not like it. The society in this world makes me sick.”
Luo Qing may be among the few artists who can describe this “sickness” with his paintings.
The painter turns this inner desperation into aesthetic behavior. The characteristics of his paintings reflect altered states of consciousness and his works at the end tell us fragile yet struggling and poetic stories.
The people in his drawings are always unhappy, melancholic and hurt. The artist has the ability to reflect that unhappiness in a perfect aesthetic movement.
Qing’s people are injured and tired. The society in Qing’s drawings is chaotic and hopeless. There is no time for happiness. The society is always depicted as violent and disordered.
The animals that he uses in his drawings such as dogs produce desperate metaphors of melancholy in society.
According to Zhu Qi, art critic, In Qing’s picture, an individual self is never a happy one but an injured, fatigue, depressed and even desperate subject powerlessly lost in a jungle society.
“He climbs upon a gigantic branchy withered tree, or lies in a canoe-like bathtub, or flies toward a huge skull as in fantasy, or huddles up in a cage for animals, which signifies a jungle image of human society, symbolizes a relationship between the mal-treater and the maltreated, and produces a desperate metaphor between the subject and the impasse,” writes Qi on Qing’s art.
Qing’s paintings remind viewers of dirty, alone and dark settings in the world. Even though it is possible to find those settings everywhere in the world, at first gaze viewers always ends up with desperation in their eyes.
Even Qing’s colors tell us a story of despair. The faces of people (blurry) tell us how much they suffer in this world.
As Houellebecq had mentioned, they are suffering to exist in this society.
However, it is an evident fact that there is a certain pleasure in the paintings. “The ultimate of human desperation and maltreatedness lies in the pleasure resulting from extreme suffering and in the imagination produced by abnormal corporeal experience”, said Qi on Qing.
Qing’s solo exhibition can be seen at Sanatorium.
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