ART.INVESTMENT · No.80, June 2014 · Cover Story (Lo Chan Peng, the issue’s cover artist)
While the art world was still caught up in debating contemporary ink, Lo Chan Peng had, four years earlier, quietly opened a second line of work alongside his realist oil painting: ink. During residencies in Berlin and Los Angeles he worked in ink and acrylic, showing a side quite apart from the meticulous oils for which he is known — wielding the ink medium to speak another pictorial language. On the long road of realist painting, Lo has never stopped weighing the limitless possibilities of making, forever transforming.
The pale, fragile faces of a garish new generation of boys and girls, stripped of their finery — extreme in their realism yet touched with a surreal, magical air — are the artistic vocabulary by which Lo is known. Yet in his 2011 and 2013 residencies abroad he began to consider another kind of expression. From Berlin to Los Angeles and back to Taipei — three cities spanning more than ten thousand kilometres — Lo drew artistic nourishment and transformed it into a wholly new form, using art to sense the social and cultural atmosphere of wherever he stood. “An artist should be like a mirror,” he says, “faithfully reflecting his feeling for the world outside.” And through his canvases he tells the viewer, tirelessly, of this steadfast conviction.
Origin: Berlin
In 2011 Lo was invited to a residency in Berlin — a city once torn between opposing camps after the Second World War, where people of every language, colour and culture converge. Here he felt a powerful cultural shock. Unlike the Taipei he knew, Berlin is a centre of Europe and one of the centres of the world, a true global village where German, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese — and the Chinese, Japanese and Korean of Asia — stand side by side, each newcomer carrying the accent of home, each chasing a dream. The sheer variety of people made the portraits in Lo’s head explode. Here he met people; here, on canvas, he painted a new kind of portrait.
It was like graffiti. Taipei is a typical Asian city — clean, orderly, correct. Berlin’s streets, by contrast, are covered in it: walls, alleys, even rubbish bins become an artist’s canvas. Painters work everywhere in the open, often fast and improvised, using pre-cut stencils, dodging the police in the dark of night, spraying quickly and vanishing. This intense form of expression struck Lo deeply — and sometimes this clean, bright young man of the Taiwanese art scene became one of those nocturnal graffiti-makers himself. Away from the Taiwan he knew, he began to think about how to set aside his familiar way of working and live and breathe with the free, unfettered pulse of the city. “I’ve always felt that graffiti is very like Chinese ink painting, and I wanted to use a new way to interpret that feeling — a little retro, a little broken, infused with something of the Eastern spirit.” And so Berlin set Lo on a new series.
When the three-month residency ended and he returned to Taiwan, he took up again the elaborate rigour of oil painting. But the new venture in Berlin was a beginning: it led him, far from home, to think more deeply about his own existence and the nature of art. In 2013 he was invited to a residency in Los Angeles, and the ink series entered a wholly new phase.
Junction: Los Angeles
Cities can never quite escape the subject of “people.” Berlin and Los Angeles are foreign ground to many, each bearing the marks of his own culture — dreamers, or those driven by necessity, gathered for countless reasons in the great metropolis. That vivid vitality is what draws Lo most. “These places aren’t like Taiwan, where almost everyone around you has lived a similar life. Here there are all kinds of people — someone who wants to act, a brashly muscular Black man, a rich heiress, a Russian woman photographer — each with a strong character, a face of his own, each blossoming on his own stage.” From Berlin to Los Angeles, the people Lo met prompted a new interpretation of the human image.
Night Dance, for instance, from the 2013 ink series “Notes on the Human World,” depicts a shaven-headed male dancer wholly absorbed in his dance. The eyes, freighted with story, catch the viewer first; line upon line seems to compose an endless weariness of years. “What I wanted to convey in this series is a feeling — one beyond appearance, beyond understanding. When two people look at each other, something stirs in each heart; but out of culture, courtesy or some tacit understanding we deliberately suppress it. That suppressed feeling is exactly what I want to stress,” Lo says.
What the ink series sets out to express is not the model’s physical state but a state of mind. When he first began in Berlin, Lo recalls, he would seize a canvas and start at once — only for the result to come out stiff and lifeless. So he gave up presupposing anything, committing the picture to the high fluidity of ink, adjusting its density with acrylic and painting by feeling. Working without knowing how the image would turn out, the failure rate was very high. “In Berlin I made more than forty pieces and brought back only eighteen; the rest failed. In those I couldn’t feel the breath of the picture moving, or the whole thing simply wasn’t the feeling I wanted.” Yet across those forty-odd works, from first attempt to growing maturity, the artist’s whole evolution is plainly visible — and that slow process of change is in fact the part of making Lo loves most.
Lo likens himself to a newborn learning, step by step, to walk towards maturity. Through it he came to understand that more important than the work is the unceasing process of attempting and making — for only by making without cease can an artist let the world outside be mirrored in his heart, let his heart become his hand, and set it all faithfully on the canvas.
Of the utterly different working conditions in Berlin and Los Angeles, Lo laughs: “In Berlin a small studio was crammed with seven artists; I had to fit myself around the others, hunched in a tiny space, the floor filthy with cigarette ends and dust. Because the canvas was raw cloth laid straight on the floor and primed there, the moment you lifted a painting it came up thick with grime. But life there was full of stimulation, the surroundings rich and various, charged with vitality. In Los Angeles, by contrast, the facilities were excellent — the museum provided a spotless studio — but it sat among quiet residential streets, far from the lively city, with little entertainment or stimulus.” From the Berlin garret to the museum-grade studio in Los Angeles, the mirroring of his surroundings turned Lo’s work abroad from the most unbound outward expression toward the most inward distillation. Between that release and that restraint, the artist climbed another step.
Turning Point: Taipei
Lo’s early work always had a clear referent, but from the “Ashen Face” series on it came to stress, more and more, a “feeling.” The ink series is, one might say, another language — a process of reinterpreting and sensing different ways of life in a foreign land, and of constant self-reckoning. He hopes the viewer will see the new series as a wholly new form of work, rather than read into it the sentiment of Chinese ink. As Lo says, he has no grounding in the traditional cultivation of Chinese ink: he cannot do the texture-strokes of classical landscape, and the “five shades of ink” with their resonance and mood are not his concern. He simply wanted, quite naturally, to join ink and acrylic to give the most direct release to all he had met — the different peoples and clashing cultures of Berlin and Los Angeles.
Back in Taiwan from Los Angeles, Lo reveals that he is ambitiously planning an entirely new series of oil paintings, titled “The Mist Walker.” Its first major work will be shown for the first time at AKI Gallery’s booth at this November’s Art Taipei. “The Mist Walker” unfolds a fictional world in which figures of different cultures, dress and character interweave into a vast scene; he expects the project to take at least seven or eight years and three solo exhibitions to complete. Lo’s excitement is unmistakable as he speaks of it, and he adds, mischievously: “I’ve planted many threads in this project, and I look forward to the viewer’s reaction. Perhaps the first work will seem unremarkable, but once the later works reveal their faces, the audience will be astonished to find how they are all connected. For an artist, the thing most hoped for is to see surprise on the viewer’s face — it is a kind of interaction, and a kind of challenge.”
Convergence
“Every decision I make begins simply with wanting to do well something I believe is good. When you can give yourself to that without reserve, the return comes of its own accord.” Lo emerged in the art world around 2007, just as Taiwan’s contemporary market was flourishing; some might call him lucky, and forget the eight years before his debut in which he honed and challenged himself. When he first took up the brush and set out, resolute, on the hard road of art, it began only with the wish to do a thing he thought worth doing. “Like buying a house recently,” he says. “People always say you must buy in a good district, somewhere with prospects. But I bought in Sanzhi, where prices are unlikely to move much any time soon, and spent a great deal. I only wanted a place to give myself wholly to work — I never imagined so many performers would come to rent it to shoot music videos. That I never foresaw.”
His work may keep changing in form, yet the angle of approach never does: how to be inspired by one’s living environment and, on the world stage, make one’s own self stand out. On this he turns serious: “Taiwan has its own particular background and culture, bound by a thousand threads to Chinese culture — but how do we forge another spirit of our own? Many think internationalisation means making work that looks of international standard; I think it means setting your own thing before the world without its light being dimmed. Even if one day I am fortunate enough to become an international master, that founding intention will not change.”
In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino has the aged Marco Polo recount to Kublai Khan the cities he has passed through. To walk within a city is to discover its many faces, each with its own enchantment — yet the most perfect place of all remains forever within the heart. Lo is like that storyteller Marco Polo: in Taiwan or abroad, he tells faithfully of his own life — what he sees, what he thinks, all he has felt and been awakened to — through stroke after stroke that reveal his bearing on the canvas. We are all listeners; following his story, we sketch in our hearts the ideal picture, whose flavour only the one who has tasted it can know.
