The gallery didn’t even have a sign. If I hadn’t been invited to come and see the show, It’s unlikely I would’ve known it was here. It was like proper Europe outside. Everything was so bright. The people walking past were speaking a continental language. It was the first time this year I had overdressed for the weather, and my long coat hung heavy on my shoulders. In the bar next door, people were sitting outside, sipping cold beers and consuming business lunches. I longed to be among them. Instead, I walked towards the gallery. Four staffers gathered around the doorway, pointing at corners, walls, and floors. They said things like, “Do you think we’d do that for an art fair?” I squeezed past one of them and tried to look at the show.
The exhibition was a solo show by Junyi Lu, an artist not much older than me. It comprised mostly wall-based mixed-media pieces over two floors, and it conjured a specific visual world. One painting showed a half of a naked figure on the left of a large canvas. Her head was essentially cut off and replaced by long strands of floating hair. There was a little block of wood on the edge of the canvas, beside where the head should’ve been, and bits of hard thread flowed out from the wood as the hair did in the picture. Little pieces of imagery floated on a strange, greeny background: A black dot. A cat with a fowl in its mouth. Paintings like this space with some sculptures, looking like they’d been lifted directly from the paintings. They were made of everything: shirt fabrics, stitches, wood, pipes, wires, burnt candles, ceramics, and metals. A running theme was women and girls looking sad, confused, naked, ethereal, and ephemeral. Downstairs, a piece of wall had been artificially torn open, revealing cotton-wool insulation. Very modern, I thought.
I did have a favourite. On the top floor, six dots glowed on a moody, stitched-together canvas. They were in a horizontal line, vaguely in the middle of the picture. A thin black cross obscured the third dot from the right. It was a small, appealing image that looked like an alien spaceship landing in a foggy field at midnight. The frame was nice, too: part wood, part leather, which the artist has made herself. But something bugged me about it. The painting was called 20241222(sun). Imagine being asked what your favourite painting was called, and you replied, “Oh it’s called twenty-twenty-four one two two two open parenthesis sun closed parenthesis. What a picture that is!” It’s silly. Downstairs, the ridiculous names continued. From the wall hung a ceramic leg bent at the knee, which was missing, attached to some wooden boards. That sculpture was called G.radual, H.idden, M.assive. I mean… What is the point of those dots? Sometimes I think, either give it a proper name or keep it untitled. I started to think about leaving the show.
Should a function of art be to take you away from your surroundings, transport you to another world? Rather than feeling like I was between Vauxhall and Stockwell, should I have felt like I was living in the mysterious, dangerous, undefined environs of Junyi Lu’s pieces? I dutifully padded around the show and looked at all the pieces, but I could feel the light streaming in from outside. I could feel the heat on my back. I wanted to be away from the washed out mixed-media pictures of forlorn girls. Our new turbo-climate-crisis springtime had arrived and I had to be a part of it. I clipped up the stairs, brushed past the still-ongoing meeting, and stationed myself in front of the bar next door. Coat off, legs crossed, I whiled an hour away drinking coffee and staring at my phone. What could be better?
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