Xiao Lu (artist)

Xiao Lu 肖鲁
Born	April 1962 Huangzhou, China
Nationality	Chinese
Known for	Installation art, Video art

Xiao Lu (Chinese: 肖鲁, born 1962) is a Chinese artist who works with installation art and video art.

She became famous in 1989, when she participated in the 1989 China Avant-garde Exhibition with her work, Dialogue. Just two hours after the exhibition opened, she suddenly shot her own work with a gun, causing an immediate shutdown of the exhibition. When the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred four months later, her actions were heavily politicized, referred to as “the first gunshots of Tiananmen”.

Xiao Lu was born in Hangzhou, China, in April 1962. She came from a revolutionary family with both of her parents being Socialist Realist artists; a tradition that she rebelled against.

In July 1984, Xiao Lu graduated from Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts Middle School.

In 1988 she graduated from the Oil Painting department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, where she was the daughter of the President of the Academy.

In her 2010 novel Dialogue (2010), Xiao Lu reveals that she was sexually abused by a guardian trusted by her parents who came from the older generation of Socialist Realist art. She states that she telephoned this man not long after shooting her artwork Dialogue in 1989, although has not confirmed whether or not he is related to her decision to shoot the artwork.

Preparations for the China Avant-garde Exhibition began in 1986. It was the first time that an art exhibition for contemporary Chinese artists had been organized and curated solely by Chinese organizers. After having been postponed in 1987 by the launch of the Chinese Communist Party's political movement, “Against Bourgeois Liberalization”, the exhibition finally received official permission to open at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing on the 5th of February 1989.

At around 11:10 am on the 5th of February 1989 – two hours after the China Avant-garde Exhibition opened – Xiao Lu fired two shots into her own work, Dialogue, with a gun. The exhibition was immediately closed after the gunshot by the officials of the museum. Xiao Lu and Tang Song were arrested.

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