Lu Pingyuan was born in 1984 in Jinhua, Zhejiang province. His artworks involve a variety of media, including texts, installations, videos and paintings. He lives and works in Shanghai.
Lu writes stories as a way to express his artistic points of view. He collects singular and odd stories from various sources. and turns them into something enigmatic and spiritual, part-real, part-fictional. The notion of ritual is fundamental to his work, a means to interrogate the connections between contemporary art and cultural rites. He is fascinated by the work of the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara (1932-2014), and has positioned himself as the deceased artist’s heir, having had a dream in which On Kawara himself asked Lu to continue the Today series. Today involved painting the current date in neat block capitals, on a plain background and in the language of the country where the artist was located on that day. These are paintings about the inexorable passage of time, and about the impossibility of revisiting the past.
Lu has exhibited at the A4 Contemporary Art Center, Chengdu (2014); the Goethe Open Space, Goethe Institute, Shanghai (2013). He participated in shows at the V Art Center, Shanghai (2013); the Bund 18 Gallery, Shanghai (2011); the Liverpool Biennale (2016); the Moscow Biennial (2015); the 3rd Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ural, Russia (2015); the 3rd Ural Biennial, Kunsthaus, Graz, Austria (2015); Cc Foundation, Shanghai (2015).