Lu Bin Beave Fossils

By Glen R Brown
Issue 6\2006 <Ceramic Monthly >

For archaeologists, ceramics have long been among the most telling of ancient artifacts, and, despite the introduction over the centuries of new materials such as plastics to the resources of technology, there is no reason to suppose that ceramic objects should ever have ceased to be significant cultural documents. “Ceramics,” Lu notes, “have historically adapted themselves to different circumstances, and have provided detailed accounts of their times for later scholars. Ancient Chinese ceramics ?the bricks and tiles of the Han dynasty, the tri-colored glazed ceramics of the Tang dynasty, and the blue and white porcelains of the Ming dynasty ?look like a bunch of brilliant fossils connecting history with culture. Each great change in the style of ceramics is closely related to larger historical transformations. As the scholar Zhu Yan has said: ‘Knowledge of politics is based on changes in the history of ceramics.’”

Lu has good reason to accept this assertion, since it is largely confirmed by his own history. Born in 1961, he grew up during the Cultural Revolution. Compelled by political injunction to relocate with his family from Beijing to the rural mountainous region of Guizhou in Southwest China, he would not have developed a career in ceramics at all if not for the political transformations that occurred with the death of Mao and the introduction of the more open policies of Deng Xiaoping. Moving from Guizhou to Nanjing, he was among the first class of graduate students in ceramics at the Nanjing College of Art, where he completed his degree in 1988. Studying under Pan Chun Fang, a master of zisha teapots in the Yixing tradition, he acquired both a knowledge of traditional forms and an exacting sense of craftsmanship. He also became aware of a new movement that was beginning to ripple through Chinese ceramics, unsettling its serenity and posing problems relative to tradition.

The 1980s, with its more lenient attitudes toward the international community and particularly the West, saw the rising influence of modernist formalist theories in China. As Dr. Sun Zhenhua writes, “The key words of the ceramics circle during this time were ‘rebellion’ and ‘language.’ The focus then was on rebelling against the confinement of traditional ceramics forms and consequent categorization [of ceramics as] a branch of industrial art. They did this by setting up a ceramics language that is expressive, individual, creative and different.” Lu, together with a group of other young ceramic artists known collectively as the “Fourth Generation”, began exploring possibilities for clay that were not a part of the existing repertoire. At the same time, his work over the past two decades, and particularly his most recent sculptures ?the Type series, Urban series, the Brick and Wood Structures, and now the Fossils ?cannot be characterized as purely formalist. The metaphor of the ceramic fossil and its convergence with Cao Xueqin’s Story of the Stone is indicative of what Lu’s thoughts have been for some time regarding the ceramic object. The setting for Cao’s novel is the ancient city of Nanjing (which is popularly known as the Stone City for having grown over the ruins of the 3rd-century fortress of Sun Quan, ruler of the Wu kingdom). Although Lu began his Fossil series in early 2000, before taking up his current position at the Nanjing Art Institute, he was already contemplating the symbolic significant of the ruins. “Today,” he explains, “the ancient capital is no longer in existence. What remains are its historical site and a few sections of the city wall. Part of the wall was built with both brick and stones forming an integral whole. It’s difficult to distinguish one from the other.”

The difference, of course, is not primarily visual: it inheres in the differing conditions under which stones and bricks are formed. The former are products of natural processes, and hence initially mere consequences of geological events. Only when shaped by human hands do they become something different: something more like cultural objects than natural forms. Bricks, on the other hand, are ?in common with all ceramic forms ?fundamentally cultural, since the humans who have made them could not escape their situation as cultural beings nor separate their actions from the circumstances that defined their culture. Recognizing this, Lu has been keenly aware that the objects he fashions from clay are on some level, and perhaps in ways that are not even currently perceptible, embodiments of the culture that conditions him. As such, they are destined to represent the present in the future, like fossils of what will someday be a distant and only vaguely grasped phase of human history.

It is for this reason that the ostensibly fossilized objects in Lu’s most recent work include not just natural and timeless forms, such as fish or fruit, but also forms belonging exclusively to the present. To a certain degree, Lu’s recognition of the role that his works will eventually play as cultural fossils exerts a sense of responsibility over his choice of content. China today is internally convulsed by industrial growing pains and increasing consumerism and externally agitated by the rapid and relentless advance of global society. The cultural transformations in contemporary China are every bit as dramatic as the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution half a century ago, and for Lu it has become imperative that his work confront the moment rather than escape into the serenity of the past by perpetuating the forms of traditional ceramics.

“Contemporary China is faced with problems of culture and history, of tradition and modernity,” he observes. “It would be cowardly to avoid the challenges presented by these problems. Those works of art that are brave in recording contemporary puzzles and pains will eventually have the opportunity to be placed in the glass cabinets of future museums, because they depict the features of this age. This consequence brings us back to the theme of The Story of the Stone. Everything in the world is as transient as a fleeting cloud. The greatest fortune is eventually to become a ‘fossil’ with an episode recorded upon it.”

This vision of the future ?which can only fully realize itself through an immersion in the present and separation from the past ?is the epitome of the modernist conception of art. It is perhaps the most reasonable and effective perspective in a nation that is witnessing such extraordinarily rapid cultural change Lu may be primarily concerned with content rather than aesthetic form, but there is an undeniable vanguard quality to his reasoning: only that which breaks with the conventions of the classical art of the past will acquire the potential to become itself a future classic. “Formally,” Lu asserts, “my work is the betrayal of traditional ceramics. Seen through the circumstances of the present, my sculptures are not a part of traditional ceramic art at all. From the standpoint of history, however, the advanced ceramic art of today will necessarily become the traditional ceramic art of tomorrow. This is the hope for my work.”