FQM is pleased to present Alpine Flora, a solo exhibition of recent works on paper and silk by Luo Min. Based on plants encountered during her travels in Zoigê, the series brings together close observation and the artist’s intuitive approach to painting. Drawing on the format of botanical illustration, Luo attends both to the forms of the plants and to her own experience of looking. Alpine Flora is on view from January 14 through February 20, 2027, at Fu Qiumeng Fine Art. Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, January 14, from 5 to 8 pm.
Luo Min's work often grows out of a journey. In August 2025 she travelled to Zoigê, on the northeastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau, photographing what she passed and gathering plants, which she carried back to Chengdu and pressed into specimens. She had no particular flowering season to catch. She arrived in August, and so it was the plants of August she met. The first sight was a matter of chance; the looking that followed was exact. Back in the studio she returned again and again to the photographs and the specimens, choosing the plants that answered something in her, and drew each one after its own bearing.
The close attention paid to these plants came alongside a reconsideration of her own circumstances. Several rounds of isolation during the pandemic, and the ordinary accumulation of years, brought home to her how little one person can alter, and she began giving more of her time back to her own feelings. Alpine Flora carries that inward turn forward. As she attends to the plants’ particular forms, she also becomes attentive to herself in the act of looking.
This fineness of feeling is bound up with her choice of materials. In oil painting, she works through the thickness of the paint and the tension that thickness can hold; on paper she works through a fine line, which carries an inner experience harder to put into words. She collects handmade papers of every kind. When a sheet pleases her, she sets it aside and waits for the painting it deserves. Paper may be old or new, its tones warm or cool; paper and image must be at ease with one another. Long before anything takes form, her relationship with a painting begins with the choice of paper.
In earlier work she had already tried setting out plants and animals in the manner of specimens, sorted and classified, letting personal feeling seep into an order built for identification and record. That interest carries on here. Borrowing the form of the botanical illustration, she says, is a kind of game: which plant is drawn, whether it is left in ink outline or carried into color, which lives are set together on one sheet. These choices are guided by her aesthetic judgment and intuition. Some leaves crowd close, color laid over color until the foliage takes on weight; elsewhere a plant is held up by a few fine lines alone, a pale flower head hanging at the tip of its stem.
The writings belong to the picture as much as the plants do. Writing scatters near the leaves: carried on a collaged patch of yellowed paper, running along a stem, gathered inside grids ruled in vermilion, adding a little weight where the sheet would otherwise stand empty. Text and foliage echo one another, recalling the poetic sensibility of inscriptions in Chinese painting. Reading the notes, we come to know the plants through Luo Min’s observations; looking at the writing, we sense the changing pace of the brush and the subtle play of lines gathered closely or spaced apart. The apparatus of identification becomes a language of painting, and the writing takes part in the composition both by what it says and by how it sits.
There is stillness in the sparse passages, and wildness in the dense. From small sheets given to a single plant to larger ones where many share the ground, the arrangement loosens. Each plant has a distinct structure and strength; together, they begin to evoke the open landscape. Plants and creatures encountered by chance are now neighbors on one sheet. On the large work on silk, hung unframed against the wall, the blank above and below opens like country not yet explored, and the plants seem to be growing of their own accord.
Alpine Flora gathers what she saw on that open ground into a record shaped by personal memory. Under this kind of attention, the ordinary shape of a plant begins to take on gravity. The one who looks attends to the particular form of a living thing, and in choosing how to look and how to draw, comes into view as well.
