Yao Lu (姚璐), born in 1967 in Beijing, is a Beijing-based artist and Professor of Photography at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Yao Lu creates landscapes from landfills and piles of litter, covering them with a green net before photographing them from different angles. Next, he creates a photomontage made up of details taken [...]
Clouds represent the focus of your artistic research. Why? For me, clouds expose the unknown. They are always in motion, constantly in a state of becoming. For some years now, I have been having conversations with climate scientists. Our discussions revealed that there are so many processes in the atmosphere which remain unknown. This idea [...]
In your personal exhibition here in Venice, "Medusa Alga Laguna", you show a particular interest in the jellyfish and algae of the lagoon ecosystem. Sargassum algae is an invasive species that arrived recently here in Venice, which is creating major problems in the lagoon, just like jellyfish, which are also on the rise. Their proliferation [...]
The name of your duo, Recycle Group, refers to the environment. It is very pioneering, did you intend from the start to address environmental issues? Our name is that of our first exhibition, Recycle , in 2008 in Moscow. This idea of recycling is constitutive of our approach. For us, it goes further than a [...]
Your work raises awareness of the effects of globalization, including its consequences on the environment and urbanization. How did these issues appear in your work? In the 1990s, the end of the Cold War moved the world from confrontation to integration. The rise of the internet and the easier access to transportation increased international communication. [...]
What role do environmental issues play in your work? Current challenges - such as the melting glaciers, the extinction of plant species, the mutation of animals or pandemics, and how humanity is called to coexist with these realities - become a territory of endless learning for me and my artistic exploration becomes a way of [...]
How did environmental issues appear in your work? Was there a light-bulb moment, an influence? There was no light-bulb moment. It happened very naturally. Very early on, I became interested in our relationship to space, to the world that passes through us and that we pass through. Working in the field, in the landscape, with [...]
When did the environment first become a theme in your work? Living in Beirut, I started to smell pollution in the 2000s on the way to Fine Arts school every day. I felt that the air was very polluted and it was entering my lungs. We also had a big waste crisis a few years [...]
When did ecology first come into your work? At the School of Fine Arts in Bourges, I worked on brutalist, post-industrial architecture; then I made a study trip to Mongolia which connected me to the landscape and the natural elements - it was then that I realised I’d missed my rendezvous with the landscape up [...]
Art of Change 21 - How did you start to deal with environmental issues in your work? I have always been drawn to the natural world. My father is a geophysicist, and some of my first memories are of the small museum of geology in the building where he worked. At its entrance was an [...]
