Luo Min Chinese, b. 1968

Luo Min (born 1968, Luzhou, Sichuan Province, China) is a contemporary Chinese painter based in Beijing. She graduated from the China Southwest Normal University, and received a master’s degree in fine art from the Fine Art Academy of People’s Liberation Army. 

The attraction of Luo Min’s painting lies in both her divergent portrait of memory and her creative harmonization of oil, watercolor, and ink painting genres, through which she registers a world of memories, sensations, personal relationships, and emotions within plants, animals, poems, and collages that revitalize the meaningful past. 

Art is a site where Luo Min negotiates objectivity and poetics, oblivion and remembrance, the personal and the historical, and the domestic and the foreign. Instead of choosing her side, Luo finds a way to burgeon in the middle of binaries through her brushwork and her selection of pigments and papers. She paints specimens with fuzzy tenderness, searching for the sense and charm of nature while preserving the scientific manner in composition. She paints memory as a combination of portraits as solid images and plants as symbols for the fading times that only leave a light hue behind. Her figures hide behind, and sometimes even turn into, the flowers, leaves, and birds in the layers closer to the viewing eyes, waiting to be revoked when an ignorable detail in her daily encounters conjures a mental journey back to the past. 

Luo collects handmade papers with various textures and tones; with uneven edges, the sheets preserve both the rigid geometry in their general shapes and a tenderness of hand in the details. Often collaged within a larger frame, these aged pieces of paper host poems, stories, or explanatory texts in the form of inscriptions, creating small chambers of thoughts and feelings that add another dimension to the image for the eyes to travel and discover surprises. 

As an internationally recognized artist, Luo Min has exhibited at National Art Museum of China, Beijing Fine Art Academy Museum, Today Art Museum in Beijing, China Art Museum in Shanghai, Shanghai Oil Painting & Sculpture Institute Art Museum, PS122 in New York, Kyoto City Museum of Art in Japan, Palacio del Conde de Lombillo in Havana, Cuba, Casa Vicens in Barcelona, Spain, and Casa de Vacas Cultural Center in Madrid, Spain.