From a distance, Lu Zhang’s work is not always seductive – the drawn lines are but whispers on white paper. Passing it by, though, would be a mistake. Its delicate nature asks you to step closer, squint, and see.
What awaits? Imagined environments, brightly built and brimming with textural delights. Waving cloth, wilted flowers, knotted strings, shed hairs. The experience is much like looking at everyday material through a microscope – art on a nano scale, to exaggerate slightly. The Chinese-born, Baltimore-based artist says she wants the work to read differently depending on your distance from it. So when you walk toward it, the piece performs its duty – it becomes, in a sense, interactive.
Her inspiration stems from many places. For a young artist, she’s spent a great deal of time traveling – six months in Chongquing, China, and a semester in Aix en Provence, France. She’s at work on a “Beard” series – inked depictions of costume beards worn by Chinese opera performers that look effortlessly light. But inspecting each lengthy strand up close reveals her impressive, unshakeable control.
She swears it’s all about the process, that each piece is an intricate documentation of time that passed happily – just her making marks on paper, sunlight streaming into her high-ceilinged studio. “It just happens to be beautiful,” she says. At first, this is difficult to believe. It looks orchestrated – her hands know what they are doing – but perhaps because she loses herself in the process, the spontaneity shines through.
