ODD REVIEW: Odette Fangstrem on Junyi Lu
Oddette Fangstrem reviews Junyi Lu's (cosset) exhibition at The Sunday Painter gallery
Junyi Lu’s paintings are a kind of psychic pastoralism. They depict ambiguous figures in hazy landscapes, images that play out the melancholic fantasy of a lost, idyllic past. It is, however, through a certain intensity that this pastoral fantasy is traversed and certain unconscious operations are approached.
The intensity or excess of Lu’s work can be found in holes, absences, tears. In the disruptions to the otherwise dreamy, fogged out landscapes rendered in luminous greens and blues. These pictures are, of course, Romantic, at times even nostalgic, but Lu’s use of collage, assemblage, surreal distortions offer something at odds with any cosy, Rousseauian pastoralism. It is the injunction of lack on this dream. Lu’s paintings seem to move away from the transcendentalism so many young artists adhere to, and turns inward. Here, in the workshop of the soul, the work and the ego are made synonyms. And as one is interrogated, so the other necessarily breaks down. The result is a confrontation with the object cause behind the conjuring of beautiful images: the lack that defines the self.
Lu uses the notion of a landscape, or a figure in a landscape as a stage to present this dynamic. A comparison that comes to mind is Tarkovsky’s Solaris, in which the tension between ego and unconscious is dramatised in the frame of a sci-fi thriller: the protagonist, Kalvin, is sent to a space station, which floats above Solaris, a mysterious oceanic planet. Solaris is a symbolic multiplicity, an oceanic mind that is capable of conjuring for the subject disturbing and distorted images of Kalvin’s past, which haunt him and the crew, violently. The tension in Lu’s work comes from a similar relationship between an ego lost in a desolate, impenetrable green fog of the unconscious, which casts up unreal, half-remembered images of some repressed and unrecoverable psychic material. These images can be, as they are in Solaris, both beautiful and terrible. But only in flashes: little glitches, strange figures and holes which threaten the whole tranquil, green dream. Collaged, erased, half-realised, or becoming multiple: figures merging with aspects of their landscape.
In one painting, called Builders of an Endless Echo, a figure, androgynous, naked, stands in a doorway or threshold left of the canvas. The composition is cropped sharply so that only half the figure is visible: the head is thrust out of frame, where a board of flat wood has been attached to the canvas. The head, where it meets the board, has become a system of dark stems or tentacles or wires which stretch across from the upper left across the canvas. The painting is washed in saturated greens and blues. A prowling cat with offal in its mouth adds a quiet suggestion of domesticity and violence.
But the intensity of the image, what strikes us or pierces us, is the puncture — the representation of lack: a hole in the centre of the painting. Painted just off centre, slightly seeping, this ambiguous hole collapses the painting on itself. The hole simultaneously draws our attention to a second puncture: the small dark hole of the figure's navel.
In this surreal doubling, this mirroring of the puncture in the belly of the figure, here is something completely different to the pastoral, picturesque sensibility: the holes make the painting, with its feverish colours, a vaporous surface of mists obscuring the fundamental absence below its surface. They suggest that this is the self: a beautiful construction that turns around a lack. This is what the real is: that which cannot be represented by any symbolic system, the pith against which our fantasies and knowledge break against.
These two holes are points of dislocation from the fantasy: two concentrated points, two black holes, where the pastoral cannot enter. In the manner light passes over a black hole, the visual language of the painting passes over these points, washes around them. And so, in themselves, the holes become, by their apparent refusal to make sense, an articulation of a fundamental lack. A placeholder for what is barred from entering any symbolic system: the real. Hence this kind of mouthing, this unspoken aspect of Lu’s paintings. The silent speech which is a circumnavigation of absence, a kernel of impenetrability, a pebble in the mouth, an oceanic multiplicity beneath the painting. It reappears, remerges in the dream-world of the paintings as a drain, as a cat's mouth, as an entry point, a doorway or an ear, a tear, a fold, or once again as a depthless navel – that penultimate signifier of severance from the holistic state within the womb.
Or are these two holes the same? Like a Möbius strip, the self folds inwards, the painting collapses, the hole reappears in another form.
The painting reveals through its schism, through its point of rupture, that to be a self, to be a subject, to be real, to be, is to lack. Our desires, our fantasies which play out their pretty, ghostly narratives, staged on ever more perfect and extravagant stages, are not what define us. It is the impenetrable absence, the unresolvable lack that conjures these ghosts, which define us. Against this multiplicity, which punctures and punctuates all desire, romance, or idealism, our fantasy breaks open. It’s this sudden traumatic encounter with the real, when we are faced with the ruins of our fantasy having traversed its limits, that we form a new understanding of the self. The two dark holes in the painting stare back at us like the depthless eyes of a reflection.
Junyi Lu’s exhibition (cosset), runs at The Sunday Painter gallery in London until 26 April 2025.
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The depiction of the holes and the significance they hold in Lu’s paintings is so rich and intricate. I love how it brings the whole theme together, beautifully written!!
Absolutely adore the analysis of Builders Of An Endless Echo- the concept of building and creating something out of the holes is remarkable!