OCAT Shenzhen is pleased to present Lu Pingyuan’s solo exhibition “Trapping Cooking, Cooking Trapping, It’s a Lovely Life”, featuring a series of site-specific new works. Curated by Wang Jinghan, the exhibition will be held at Hall B of OCAT Shenzhen.

Spanning text, installation, painting, and sculpture, Lu’s works are imbued with narrative and metaphor. Drawing inspiration from art history, classic literature, popular culture, and personal experience, the artist builds a gigantic world of fantasy homologous with reality to reveal the spiritual predicament of contemporary human beings and rediscover the potential for spiritual connection between people and the universe.

In the exhibition, Lu displaces the imaginary and physical spaces and make them collide, constructing a field comprising multiple narrative relations. Taking the two dimensions of the gallery hall and the storybook, the exhibition will present a series of artistic creations inspired by the fairytale “Hansel and Gretel”.

In the story “Hansel and Gretel”, a sister and brother, lost in the forest, are enticed into a candy house in a witch’s trap and finally outwit the witch and return home. Lu extracts imageries from the story including children, family, candy house, cookie crumbs, and boiler, and reorganizes them into a new reality. Combining popular culture, personal experience, and the public’s real-life anxieties, he creates a theatre of polyphonic narratives parallel to the metatext.

When launching the “Arcades Project”, Walter Benjamin saw it as a version of “Sleeping Beauty” – that is, a dialectical story of childhood. Through montage techniques, fragmented texts are connected and narrated in a surreal way. Like a prince’s kiss, Benjamin tried to awaken the European masses to the truth of capitalist life. Similarly, in this exhibition, Lu dismantles a childhood story and produces a series of fragmented images. If the audience capture these randomly scattered images and bridge the gaps in between using their imagination, the exhibition hall will be transformed into a space that can summon stories. Lu wishes that stories may become the fuel for dreams and initiate a nocturnal adventure.

OCAT Shenzhen will publish the exhibition’s namesake artist book, which extends the exhibition in another dimension parallel to its physical rendering.