LINGRUI LOU

Artistic Inquiry: Reshaping Narratives through History, Body, and Culture

My practice engages appropriation, collage, and re-contextualization to question dominant narratives. I explore three key areas: History informs my examination of suppressed memories versus official records, challenging linear historical interpretations. Gender politics drives my creation of bodily counter-narratives that resist binary categorization and commodification. "Peripheral" cultures inspire my study of non-mainstream art forms as tactics of resistance and adaptation. My work creates uncomfortable encounters that estrange familiar signs, aiming not to answer but to sustain questioning. Through these explorations, art becomes a continuous intervention in the intersections of power, memory, and identity.

Artist statement

As I grew up, some certain refrains were constant: "Be a lady," "Don’t make a scene," "Lower your voice." Those socially imposed labels have long confined women within the rigid mold of 'propriety.' Historically, the suppression of female autonomy and critical thinking has made too many women accustomed to silence. It was precisely this discipline that ignited my creative drive. My art is a conscious rupture from that aesthetics of obedience. I reject permissible and safe expression. I seek what is sharp, disruptive, and piercing, which unsettles the viewer and makes them unable to be ignored. .......