Lu Shengzhong

Lu Shengzhong(Chinese:吕胜中) (born 1952) is a Chinese artist who specializes in the ancient Chinese art of paper cutting. He grew up during the turbulent Cultural Revolution, did not follow the pack of Chinese contemporary artists who embraced the international vogue for installation art as his country began opening up to the West in the 1980s. "I walked away from the cultural confusion of the time and turned back to traditional folk art," he says. From the first look, his red tissue-paper tableaux, with their centermost, adjust, mandala-like frames, look like antiquated calligraphic goes with falling streams of hand-drawn elements skimming over the musings of sages. In reality, those vertical lines of red checks are made up of the negative-space from Lu's greater outlines.

Lu was born in the Dayuji village in Shangdong, China, in 1952. Shangdong has long been known for its paper cutting art culture. Lu’s father was a farmer where his mother was a house-wife, who was well known around the village for her paper cutting talents. As a child, Lu fell in love with the way his mother would create art with cut scraps of paper.

"My mother had a very skilled pair of hands. She made paper cuts, embroidered, drew floral decorations, decorated wedding rooms, cooked matou when visiting relatives and did many other things. These are all beautiful details of everyday life. I was fascinated by it and participated."

As Lu got older, his fascination for paper cutting began to fade. As a young adult he joined the army for a short while. After the army, he worked for a short period of time as a film projectionist. In the mid 1970s he attended art school at Shangdong Normal University, and graduated in 1978 with a degree in Fine Arts. After Graduattion he later attended Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in Beijing, China for his masters program in the early 1980s. During this time period, China’s art scene began a change from socialist realist paintings. His classmates began to discover rock & roll music, bleu jeans, jazz, as well as the art genre of Dada. Lu Shengzhong graduated from Central Academy of Fine Art in 1987, with a masters in folk art.

"With the ending of the Cultural Revolution, China opened its long-closed doors to the outside world. 'The moon in the West is brighter than the one in China.' The public tried to imitate the West, the model for those Chinese who were eager to succeed. It was a very interesting time but it did not, in my opinion, leave behind much of lasting importance. Artists, too, tried to copy the West in so many ways. … Thus in the mid-1980s, I walked away from the cultural confusion of the time and turned back to the villages, to traditional Chinese folk art."

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