Luo Brothers
... unarguably fun, packed full of intense explosions of colour and imagery, and is seen as one of the earliest influences of Chinese contemporary art in the artistic communities of the West.
Luo Wei Dong b. 1963, Luo Wei Bing b. 1964 and Luo Wei Guo b. 1972, Nanning, China
The brothers come from the Guangxi Autonomous Region of China and attended the Guangxi Academy of Art, the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, and the Central Academy of Applied Arts. They began to work together in 1996 whilst living in Beijing.
In the late 1980s the visibility of American Pop art such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jeff Koons in China proved to be a powerful influence on the Luo Brothers’ development of yansu, or “gaudy,” art. Born around the time of the Cultural Revolution, they witnessed the break-neck speed of economic development of China, as well as an increased emphasis on material possessions.
Part of the Political Pop movement in China, their artistic style draws from the kitsch propaganda used during the Cultural Revolution; juxtaposing images of Mao iconography with Western consumerism. They depict happy fat baby cherubs holding aloft soda cans, fast food and TV screens, adopting figures from Chinese advertisements which promote these icons of the West and immortalise them in paintings and fibreglass monuments.
Rather than a critique of either Communism or Capitalism, their work is instead intended to serve as a barometer of the socio-economic and cultural change in China. Their work is unarguably fun, packed full of intense explosions of colour and imagery, and is seen as one of the earliest influences of Chinese contemporary art in the artistic communities of the West.
Their works are in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan amongst others. They have been exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions.
