Weihui Lu
Linocut of Song Dynasty painting Fisherman's Evening Song and mixed media on tracing paper, pine, sawdust, photographs
( photo by Paul Takeuchi )
MW : Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
WL : My name is Weihui, and my work often comes out of a relationship with a place. Over the years, it’s become increasingly site-specific; the mediums and materials often change, but my interest in places – their characters and the histories they are embedded with, and the way they choreograph our movement through them - has gotten more entrenched over time.
Linocut, charcoal, pencil, ink and acrylic on tracing paper, sawdust, and photographs
( photo by Paul Takeuchi )
MW : How do you decide on the materials you use, and do you have specific methods on how are these collected?
WL : It’s often a combination of circumstance, intuition, and what the piece asks of me. There might be a material through line for a few years – for a while I was playing with textiles, and more recently I’ve been exploring papermaking – but oftentimes the place itself and what is available dictates much of the materiality.
At residencies, you never quite know what your studio will be like ahead of time, and I like keeping myself open to the surprises that they can offer. For example, I was working on a print at ALN that touched on the history of deforestation both locally and in historic China, and I happened to be given the woodshop as my workspace. The piles of sawdust that I was surrounded by ended up becoming an integral part of the final installation. When working outside, I also will sometimes gather materials directly from the site that I am working with, but I try to be intentional about this, and question myself on what I really need. I see the gathering process more as a way of getting to know the land, and I often return the things I accumulated at the end of my time there.
( photo by Paul Takeuchi )
MW : What usually comes first for you: the physical experience of being in a place, or research into its history and ecology?
WL : This also depends on the project and the specific circumstances around it.
Recently, I’ve been moving more towards embodiment and trying to learn things about the place through an intuitive and lived exchange. Sometimes I find that research beforehand can direct your questions too much and make you blind to the things that are actually the most resonant about a place. Research is always a mediated experience - I think it can be helpful later on, but I like to form my own perspective first when I can.
sunlight, hand-frosted glass, mild steel, soil, cast taro and cane begonia plants in aqua-resin, plaster, spray paint and epoxy clay
sunlight, hand-frosted glass, mild steel, soil, cast taro and cane begonia plants in aqua-resin, plaster, spray paint and epoxy clay
MW : How does time function in your work?
WL : Time is always slipping and sliding for me. I think I’m interested in an experience of time which is outside of capital accumulation and a consuming relationship to labor – time that slips the leash of hours, days, and countability. It’s the sense of time you feel when you look at a living being – a plant, a young child, the skin at the corner of your eye - and you notice, oh, there’s been a real change here. It feels like it happened all at once, but really a gradual process.
I’m also interested in time as a marker of sincerity. The time spent touching and shaping an object, the time spent walking a certain place, as a way of exchanging something. As artists, we are always demanding things from our work; for it to perform, perhaps to move someone. For me, the time that we give is what balances this exchange.
( photos by Flaneur Shan Studio )
MW : You describe your practice as grasping toward an “ethics of impermanence.”
What ethical responsibilities emerge for you when making ephemeral works?
WL : Ephemerality is a perspective, to me. It’s a choice to take up less space in time. With technology, we’re often trying to control the life, the usability of things; at the heart of it, I think there is a territoriality to this, a desire to “leave a mark,” maybe something like a grasping towards immortality. The reality is that everything will eventually vanish. Maybe there is a grief to this, but it’s also necessary – if nothing dies, there is no room for new life. In some ways, both literally and energetically, it feels like we are stealing time from the future when we insist on permanence.
( photos by Flaneur Shan Studio )
( photos by Flaneur Shan Studio )
MW : You mention dreaming of “an earth beyond mapping.” How does your work resist systems of categorization, documentation, or institutional framing?
WL : I feel so leery of things like categories and labels, of easy access in general, because it feels like access has become so intertwined with consumption. In a landscape, mappability often goes hand in hand with extraction.
For example, the places where there are still deep oil reserves are often difficult to physically access; only recently have they begun to be developed, due to new technology that allows people to “know” what is contained deep in the earth without being there.
To me an earth beyond mapping is not one beyond knowing, but is known in an ongoing, relational way - the way you get to know a place you have walked throughout the seasons, that you help tend, and not the type of knowing that is so reductive and intertwined with a one-directional type of using.
In a similar way, I think systems of categorization can support things like marketability, and the professionalization and siloing of an art practice. I’ve always been wary of being pinned down to a specific discipline, aesthetic, or material, perhaps for that reason.
I’m more interested in giving my work space to expand organically; I want to be related to as a full person.
Not everyone has the time or capacity to do that, but I am grateful for the people I’ve found who are willing to hold that kind of space and freedom for me, and maybe interested in finding it for themselves too.
( based on a satellite image of the National Oil Reserves in Alaska )
( photos by Estefanía Landesmann )
MW : How do you negotiate the tension between memory and the historical realities of a place or site?
WL :
I think this also relates to the earlier question of research. I am always aware that I am not a neutral receiver, no matter how much I try to be; in every place that I visit or make work with, I am carrying the echoes of the places I have been before, as well as who I am as a person.
When I am considering the historical realities of a site, I am also considering my relationship to those histories.
What stories do I have a right to engage with?
What histories can I work with that maybe have also shaped how I arrived at this place?
Memory is always overlaying our perception of history, and I try not to make a pretense of objectivity.
MW : How do viewers activate your installations, and what kinds of encounters are you having hoping for?
WL : The impulse is to shift a space enough to make people want to be present in it. There is so much about our lives now that takes us out of our bodies, the specific moment in time and space that we are in. But also, I think the danger of over-choreographing what viewers are “supposed” to do, feel, or take away is that the work becomes didactic. I try to present the work as an invitation: you are welcome here, and you can take this moment, if you like, or if you need to, but you also don’t have to.
Maybe I am creating encounters that I am looking for myself: when I am the most exhausted, I find myself creating spaces for rest;
when I felt in some ways the most distant from the landscape, I created a body of water in my studio that people could step into.
Acrylic and linocut on fabric, hand-made pine frame