Luo Qi China's Quest Come of Age

International, but Chinese born, artist Luo Qi, from the renown art city of Hangzhou, the largest city of Zhejiang Province in Eastern China, has already established himself on the world’s stage as an academic, poet, writer and avant garde artist. In his artistic endeavours, Luo Qi investigates Chinese calligraphy with his dynamic artistic movement Calligraphyism (aka Characterism). Luo Qi was taught at, and has lectured in, the well established China Academy of Art (est. 1928), Hangzhou, beside the stunning phenomenon of the city’s West Lake. Over many years Luo Qi has developed a fresh way of inquiry into pictorial pictogram representations, which bind the inquisitive viewer to the object, and yet which also remain referential to historic Chinese pictograms and, in particular, those carved into ancient oracle bones (for divination, used 1500 to 1000 BCE).

   In Derridean terms, artist Luo Qi deconstructs the familiar concept of Chinese pictograms, where each pictogram reveals a single thought rather than a collection of letters from an alphabet, and reconstructs them as abstracts, into fresh forms, which undoubtedly echo back to their Chinese antiquity.  

   In China, Luo Qi’s Calligraphyism has grown alongside a revival in Chinese Literati painting, deemed the New Literati movement. It is a renaissance, a signifying evocation of the breakaway moment in antiquarian Chinese artistry and literature - Literati. Back in 1998, Zhang Yiguo had written (in Brushed Voices:Calligraphy in Contemporary China) that “Luo Qi, defies accepted conventions in a more controversial manner. In some of his works he denies traditional calligraphic strokes and characters entirely, adopting instead a “universal line” that forms abstract images”.

   With these excitingly modern works of artist Luo Qi, it is the fusion of Western ideas, and methods, with those of China that Chinese art has so been longing for. Ever since the early part of the last (20th) century, China has maintained a profuse interest in Western Modern Art, its ideas and techniques. In Luo Qi, a questing Chinese art has finally come of age. It has blossomed into a fine peony, showing the world that a Chinese Spring has well and truly arrived, beautiful and exceedingly bountiful.  

  Viewers of Luo Qi’s work might be forgiven for recalling ancient Sumerian texts (26th century BCE), and the world’s first known writing system. There are similarities, particularly in Luo Qi’s ‘Love Writing’ series. It is the simplicity and beauty of both the Mesopotamian cuneiform and Luo Qi’s creations which lead to visual delights and a soupçon of intrigue. Yet,  within Luo Qi’s works there is also reference to modernity. Echoes of the late Keith Haring, with his iconic quasi-primative graphic imagery seem to haunt Luo Qi’s imagery. But where Hering’s icons are drawn (literally) from simplistic figures, ala underground comix, Luo Qi reinvents Chinese calligraphic pictograms with a complex, wonderfully pictorial ’language’ of their own.

   Luo Qi’s latter works zing with colour. Using contrasting colour, like red against green or green against red, he makes his canvases resonate with colour, forcing a visual engagement. Luo Qi manipulates shades of orange, contrasted in early icons marked with mid green, or orange upon yellow, speaking in terms of colour, formulating a fresh visual language. 

   The use of rounded shapes, and lines ending in curves, lends a degree of humour to some of the works, which echoes the playfulness of the Surrealist Joan Miro and, perhaps, shades of some of the more playful 1960s Pop Art. There are also reminiscences of imagery found on China’s own celadon glazed archaistic vases, hidden within Luo Qi’s profound referential system. Luo Qi’s oeuvre blends with a keen Post-Modernist agenda, with astutely observed historical reference, within his decorated canvases. Luo Qi’s Chinese pictograms are defined so broadly as to encompass not just traditionally brush-stoked ideas, but an entirely new spectrum of symbols and phenomena ripe for any phenomenologist to decipher.

The Chinese artist Luo Qi