Liuxu Luo
“In this world, we love something, and we practice ourselves perfectly in the thing we love. we are thus satisfied, and everything else is actually insignificant. In this way, we become strong enough to resist the loneliness that comes from time to time，comes from the word; we become brave, we learn pure and serious.”
Liuxu Luo is passionate about incorporating mix-mediums such as painting, watercolor and all kinds of textiles handicraft into her creative practice, She started using techniques like embroidery and laser cutting to develop more ways of drawing; creating new yarns and developing them into knitting and woven works. She believes using natural dyes adds a richer cultural connection to her work as well. Luo hopes her visions and creations bring something encouraging to others.
Poetry Plant, Yinyun(氤氲) and Wandering Home are both vibrant examples of Liuxu Luo’s unique voice. Poetry Plant is a dress-like piece in which patchwork and embroidery were applied to transparent layers of cloth. She created an installation that brought beauty and pleasure to the spaces it filled; like she believes plants and sunlight do, thereby changing the atmosphere to be more tranquil and vivid. Yinyun(氤氲) is a body of work dyed solely using onion skins. Yinyun(氤氲), in Chinese, is used to describe the feeling of being enshrouded, echoing the way onion skins cover each other layer by layer. Luo developed a set of onion-skin dyed garments; creating pleats and applying ornaments like laser cut pieces that represented the onion cells. Some of the silhouettes of the garments were inspired by traditional Chinese layered costumes. Luo created a short film to show the intimate process of how traditional costumes were slowly layered, dressing herself with her handmade pieces to create her own ritual in the YinYun way.
Her most recent project, “Wandering Home” is a textile installation inspired by the lifestyles and old tales of a kind of elderly wanderers, which have habits of collecting things as they wander and create their own art word by using whatever they find around them. This project is about getting inspiration from those romantic aging wanderers who live without limit of age, but with the wisdom and open-mindedness from it.
She began by creating watercolor paintings as my inspiration and collecting their color tablets, developing naturally dyed (plant-based) fabrics from them, laser cut flower-shapes and sewed them onto the dyed ribbon and silk, as an expression of new embellishment. She then created woven and knit fabrics from these new ribbons and silk threads, imitating my watercolor paintings, resulting in textile illustrations . The fabrics are designed to cover tent structures to live within or alternatively live on the body as a set of garments. And the disassembled and joined bamboo structures will be the basic form. Additionally, she combines beading and lighting to illuminate “Wandering Home” transforming into accessories for the same set of garments. The items are able to be used in these two ways to celebrate the preference of elders to make full use of everything.
The final installation, also can be assembled and disassembled, can be worn as a garment, can change shape and be rebuilt as a cozy home and a backpack, light enough to be carried, delicate, romantic and durable at the same time.
These pieces are not practical textiles for true aging nomads but instead express the freedom and imagination that she has learned from them, combined with her own passion for the natural world and her wandering soul.
Instagram - @luo_liuxu
Website - notjustalabel.com/liuxu
Email - llx.dorotea@outlook.com
