History of Chemistry I

2004 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lu Chunsheng

location: Shanghai, China
year born: 1968
gender: male
nationality: Chinese
home town: Changchun, Jilin province, China

A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory. Using long shots and atypical settings, Lu Chunsheng enigmatically refers to a distant history while conveying the sense of dislocation wrought by successive stages of modernization. The combination of elaborate landscape shots from the suburbs of Shanghai and Lu’s signature style of spare and minimally crafted acting offers a surreal view of human behavior in spaces marked by the hulking remnants of China’s extraordinary development.


A particularly generative aspect of Lu Chunsheng’s work is the way it breaches the boundary between documentary and fiction. Rather than merely illustrate it, his conceptual and methodological coherence broadens and extends his inquiry into everyday life. Unlike many of his fellow artists who emerged from the same generation, Lu does not focus on the alienation inherent to an accelerated urbanization and its stream of rapidly moving images and perplexed inhabitants.


Colors:



Related works featuring themes of: » Architecture in Art, » China, » Collective History, » Color Photography, » Chinese  
» see more

Golden Bridge
© » KADIST

Lin Yilin

Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...

Studio Construct 51
© » KADIST

Barbara Kasten

2008

Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points...

A Gust of Wind
© » KADIST

Zhang Peili

2008

In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...

Other related works, blended automatically  
» see more

I Want to be Gentleman
© » KADIST

Lu Chunsheng

2000

Lu has developed an oeuvre that consists of characters in bizarre situations...

Golden Bridge
© » KADIST

Lin Yilin

Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...

Sexy
© » KADIST

Yan Xing

2011

Sexy shows Yan Xing unsuccessfully trying to reach orgasm in freezing temperatures among the falling rocks and howling winds of a precarious canyon...

Related works from the » 2000's created around » Shanghai, China  
» see more

Unregistered City series #1 #2 #7
© » KADIST

Jiang Pengyi

2008

Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water...

Dilemma, three way of fork in the road
© » KADIST

Jianwei Wang

2007

In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...

Regard Eating Every Single Time as a Formal Declaration, My Stomach is Sexy out of Anger
© » KADIST

Xiaoyun Chen

2006

The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...

Diversionist
© » KADIST

Cao Fei

2004

Diversionist is part of the Cosplayers Series from 2004...

Other works by: » Lu Chunsheng  
» see more

I Want to be Gentleman
© » KADIST

Lu Chunsheng

2000

Lu has developed an oeuvre that consists of characters in bizarre situations...

Related artist(s) to: Lu Chunsheng » Xu Zhen, » Yang Fudong, » Qiu Anxiong, » Zhang Ding, » Cao Fei, » Chen Qiulin, » Chu Yun, » Hans Ulrich Obrist, » Huang Yong Ping, » Liang Yue  
» see more

Portrait: Cover and Clean
© » KADIST

Qiu Anxiong

2011

A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...

RMB City: A Second Life City Planning 04
© » KADIST

Cao Fei

2007

Since 2007, Cao Fei has radically focused her work on Second Life, an online space that virtually mimics “the real world” and includes everything from the expression of ideas to economic investment...

La Town
© » KADIST

Cao Fei

2014

Cao Fei’s video La Town, 2014 depicts a mythical metropolis that has been destroyed by unknown forces...

Diversionist
© » KADIST

Cao Fei

2004

Diversionist is part of the Cosplayers Series from 2004...

Related works found in the same semantic group  
» see more

John Sainsbury, Supermarket Magnate Who Transformed London’s Museums, Dies at 94 - via ARTnews
© » LARRY'S LIST

He and his brothers $35 million toward the building of a wing at the National Gallery....

A Feminist Memory Project in Nepal
© » APERTURE

An expansive archive illustrates the role of women in shaping over a century of the country's political and public life....

Les allégories
© » KADIST

Chloé Quenum

2017

The stained glass windows of Chloé Quenum’s Les Allégories evoke the sacred and describe the movement of a rooster in the form of patterns extracted from a wax fabric found in Benin...