While waiting to meet a colleague in Hong Kong, I was served an espresso, chocolate wafer and sparkling water in small conference room of UBS, on the wall was an original Luo Brothers piece from the collection called “Welcome to the world’s famous brands. The Swiss bank UBS are the owners of a collection of paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures and video art by some of the world’s major artists from 1960 onward and are recognized as having one of the most important corporate collections of contemporary art in the world.
Luo Brothers are a Chinese artist trio best known for their Pop Art take on propaganda and kitsch items produced during the Cultural Revolution in China. They often create collaged images in rich reds replete with flowers, chubby babies, fish, and fruit, which are then screenprinted and lacquer painted. The Luo Brothers also create painted fiberglass sculptures of children which are figures from Chinese advertisements. Consisting of three brothers, Luo Wei Dong (b. 1963), Luo Wei Bing (b. 1964), and Luo Wei Guo (b. 1972) from Nanning, China, they went on to attend the Guangxi Academy of Art, the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, and the Central Academy of Applied Arts.
The artists began their collaboration during the mid-1990s, and their work is meant to serve as a barometer of the socio-economic and cultural change in China rather than a critique of either Communism or Capitalism. The visibility of art by Robert Rauschenberg and Jeff Koons in China in the late 1980s proved to be a powerful influence on the Luo Brothers’ development of yansu, or “gaudy,” art. Their works are in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan, among others. The brothers live and work in Beijing, China. Source: Artnet
Photo credit: Orion Martin on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA
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