We have just examined women’s soliloquy, and creation and demise of fantasy. Fang Lu’s work is less concerned with “soliloquy” as a closed circuit of one-way speech, but a dynamic balance that one’s relationship to environment, internal and external world. Hence there’s no privileged position, such as the woman or the victim; foregrounded are the relationships that become visible in the flow of language and consciousness. It’s not about the specificity of a character, female or male, but a multitude of persons drifting between different boundaries, whose monologues about relationships allow the world to adjust itself anew. The actual taking place of speech engenders a creative process that overcomes structural patterns; Fang Lu positions her work as the catalyst for the process to take off, without framing it in yet another fantasy.

Enter Fang Lu, a Beijing-based artist whose recent artistic practice focuses on strategies of staging, re-staging and performance through the medium of video. From karaoke style sing-a-longs to reenacted events to instructional how-to vignettes, Fang Lu’s work seeks to uncover the space between mimesis and veracity, repetition and singularity. It dissects and literally re-presents specific actions and behaviors in front of the camera as a way of elevating the mundane to the realm of performance and merging real-time action or making to the act of recording itself. By further binding these moments to the highly plastic medium of video, Fang produces something that gestures at reality but is not grounded in it, plies at being live and recorded while in the process remaining utterly subject to the mutability and modification of the recorded image.

My interest in Fang Lu’s work, I believe, began when I first saw Housework Ritual. This work gives a sense of vastness and meticulousness, it is doubtless only functioning as a image, and not a record of a performance, even though we are certainly observing a performance within: dressed more like front desk employees at a hotel, there are no have angry expressions as they act out their mechanical movements in irrational scenes. To us, these familiar yet strange symbols are merely reflecting a reality, although they have absolutely nothing real to speak of. This is the essence of performance.

While studying graphic design as an undergraduate in the United States, Fang Lu saw her very first contemporary art show at PS1 in New York. She was struck by the display of TVs and sprawling cables in a darkened room, amazed by the way that art was shown more than by its actual content. The visit was inspirational for the young artist, truly expanding her understanding of art that was originally rooted in traditional Chinese art practice as exemplified by her own father, a Chinese ink painter. This experience was instrumental in moving Fang to a life as an artist instead of the graphic designer she had initially set out to become. She earned an MFA in new genres (video and performance) at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007 and returned to Guangzhou subsequently to pursue her artistic career.

Some of Fang Lu’s narrative video artworks seek out possibilities from within the irrational. In her works over the past two years, such irrational settings are often created through the actions of people and food. Her earlier works focused more on popular contemporary mediums and the experience of the body in action. Even in the least narrative of her works (such as My Classmate and Skin), we can see the body performing a lot or a little in front of the camera.