In Time; The Art of Luo Min

John Yau

Born in 1968 in Luzhou, located in China’s Sichuan province, Luo Min belongs to the wave of Chinese women artists who are committed to making contemporary art.  Among these artists, Luo stands apart from her peers because of both her subject matter and use of diverse materials. Recalling her childhood, as well making deeply affecting portraits of her mother based on family and official photos, the viewer is engaged by views of a world that is both personal and cool, infused with intense feelings just barely held at arm’s length. Their paradoxical nature is riveting. We keep looking at the ordinary while recognizing that there is nothing simple about the world we are invited to look into. 

Luo creates these quiet worlds out of thickly applied oil paint on canvas, irregular tondos, and paper, as well as watercolor and ink on paper. Her sensitivity to materials and their historical connotations can be seen in use of different kinds of paper, from thick unfixed sheets full of oil paint to rice paper on which she is used watercolor and ink to make delicate lines, ideograms, and stains of faded color. The interaction of material and support is crucial to understanding Luo’s work, her mastery of two divergent traditions, Western oil painting and Eastern ink painting. This is strikingly apparent in Luo’s use of tondos, which were artists first used during the Italian Renaissance.

In the intimately-sized, irregular tondo simply titled No. 4 (2025)­–Luo’s titles are often numbered, as if they are part of an archive of memories–two featureless, adolescent girls wearing identical prim uniforms look out towards the viewer.  There is a lantern on the right. Is one of the girls holding it? Might we read it as a metaphor about trying to see into the future? This is not a moment “recollected in tranquility,” as the English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, wrote about the inspirational power of memory on poetry.  Are the faces featureless because the artist cannot recall what the two girls (presumably her and her friend) looked liked? Are they anonymous, like their uniforms?

How does one–in this case, a young woman–decide the nature of her destiny and what makes her an individual in a world that assigns her traditional roles, with becoming a painter not one of them? Luo complicates this question further by depicting scenes of her childhood, portraits of her mother, and unexplained encounters–domestic views.

In another, slightly larger, irregular tondo (2025),  a young, featureless girl with two pigtails wearing a pale blue blouse is engaged with a large raven, its single oversized eye looking at the viewer, as if it is a talisman whose power is unknown. An encounter between a young girl and a raven in the forest is the stuff of myths, a subject that can quickly become cliché. Such is not the case with Luo’s painting, which remains mysterious, and even unknowable. That resistance to explanation is equally true of the artist’s portraits of mother at different points in her life.

Luo’s oil portraits of her mother are titled, “A Small Portrait of Mother” and dated 2021. They begin with her mother as a child and chronologically progress until she is an adult, aged 36. Knowing the date and age of the mother, which Luo paints in English and Chinese across the bottom of the portrait, like an official record, and knowing the artist’s year of birth, viewers can deduce her mother was still a teenager when her daughter was born. We know nothing about the father or what role he played in their lives.

In A Small Portrait of Mother No. 1, whose palette of different browns recalls the source was a sepia-colored photograph, we see Luo’s mother at the age of five, her innocent eyes full of intense curiosity. There is no trace of idealization in Luo’s portraits. The beauty of their plainness is unrivaled. We watch the artist’s mother get older, as Luo responds sensitively to each photograph, true to her subject’s expression and physical changes, such as the need to wear glasses. Together, this body of work, which I suspect is larger, constitutes a significant achievement with Luo’s quietly compelling body of work. 

At the same time, Luo’s paintings of great artists, such as Frida Kahlo and Louise Bourgeois, convey her commitment to honoring the labor of women.

In another distinct of body of work, which were done in watercolor and ink on rice paper, Luo draws in delicate lines as well as writes calligraphically. Born into one historical tradition, she has gone on to master two.  One of the most affecting ones for me is Mother with a Military Satchel (2017), in which Luo has let the ink bleed into the paper so the featureless woman in a white blouse, black skirt, and plain black shoes is dissipating into the paper.

This dissipation is one of the currents running through Luo’s work. Depicting her mother’s portraits over more than three decades, Luo’s subject is memory’s attempt to preserve the ephemerality of art. Knowing that art does not withstand time’s indifference, she refuses to look away.   With immense tenderness and respect for the properties of her materials, she looks steadfastly at the effects of chaos on those she holds close to her heart and on herself, the adolescent girl worn away by time’s irrevocable power.