Luo Yongjin is an artist who, whenever he has got the chance, travels widely in China and abroad. His eyes are focused on the reality around him, be it people or their most evident creation, architecture, with its various textures/structures, and on the relationship between them. 

In recent years he has been conquered by the monstrous appearance of the newly built huge compounds in P.R. China’s expanded coastal cities, which he has portrayed in a sort of mosaic made up of individual photographs that contain small portions of the subject. In this way each photograph conserves the precision of the details and, juxtaposed to all the others, reconstructs the landscape in its entirety, like the brick in a wall. The overall effect calls to mind pre-Renaissance multiple perspective that is also part of the Chinese tradition and much closer to the eye’s vision which continuously adapts itself to the mobility of the real. The process does not only take place in space: it is something which develops in time. Luo Yongjin’s ‘work in progress’ are bi-dimensional version of colourful urban reality. They are a microcosm whose characteristics recall the macrocosm.

During a recent visit to Bangkok (his second one) the artist has caught some very representative sights of the city. Huge department stores with reflecting surfaces, shopping malls like labyrinths in which one gets lost, surrounded by the display of fancy materials and fluorescent colours, have become in Luo’s re-elaboration shiny digital-elaborated scrolls which, although recalling in shape the traditional Chinese landscapes, contain no empty corner for the eye to rest in. Or it is the tall and impressive building of a modern hotel, like the Shangrila, which captures his attention and in his work is represented as a blackish menacing tower immersed in the dusk of the evening’s river.

During the late Spring 2003, Luo Yongjin has started a new series which , although still devoted to architecture, gives as a ‘dreamy’ key to re-interpret the surrounding reality. He has discovered, in the area between the cities of Hangzhou (the ‘Venice of the Orient’) and Shanghai, numerous examples of what I would call a grotesque private architecture which  is now very fashionable in China. Its appearance is something in between ancient and modern, its shape recalls some non-definable ‘mittel-european’ villas, whose pointed roofs, bow-windows, elaborated volumes embody the exact opposite of rationalistic architecture. When we look at the many shots Luo has taken with his Hasselblad, we will necessarily be reminded of Bernd & Hilla Becher’s famous series shot in Germany in the Sixties and Seventies, which classified industrial buildings of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Here, like there, each individual picture within a series becomes a totality unto itself. 

These neat, almost scientific shots go together with others  which really puzzle us and sink us in a dreamy, milky atmosphere where geographical coordinates no longer exist. The same villas have been portrayed using the ancient and basic technique of the pinhole: the light impresses the photographic paper through a hole, and there is no use of elaborate technique nor of any light/time control device. Facing these blurred images, I thought Luo Yongjin had made some experiments in Austria or France, where he was last year, and only when I was shown their ‘sharp’ versions I realised that it was just the same Chinese environment. ‘Local’ interpretations of materials like tiles and  stainless-steel spheres on the roofs, together with the imaginative juxtaposition of different styles, has revealed unequivocally the location. While I find the blurred images very evocative, the sharp ones are fascinating for the rigor Luo Yongjin has dedicated to such an absurd subject, which amazes us with its hyper-baroque masses and with the richness of textures and surfaces. 

Looking at these architectures, and mentally linking them to the country in which they actually exist (be it China or Thailand, or Italy….) we can’t but ask ourselves: “Are we dreaming?”