Longxiang Hu

Longxiang Hu, born in Hunan, China in 1999, graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art with a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts. In 2023, Longxiang completed a Master's degree in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London.

Outside of art, Longxiang has played the role of an amateur emotional analyst among his colleagues. This stems from his curiosity about peeking into humanity, participating in and simulating different vibrant worlds. Recently, he has been conducting research titled, 'Invisible Emotional Representation in Chat Text Records of Flirt Period: The Sexual Tension of Punctuation Points'.

Longxiang's creative subjects involve materials and micro-sociological research, expressing his unspecified (or unexpected) unconventional, spiritual, aesthetic metaphors and material cultural narratives through the new repercussions of old concepts in the current era. His practice mainly focuses on visual texts dominated by glue-made plastics and bioplastics, which aim at emphasizing contemporary pre-modern spiritual principles in secularism.

Matter, or material, constantly emergess in its unique mythology, primitiveness and history in a two-way interaction with individuals and collectives. In today's society, we take plastic materials for granted. Most of us cannot imagine life without them. They have become integral to existence, like any other material. The visual text constructed with these materials is a poetic cultural puzzle and a collective trace of movement.

Longxiang's practice investigates plastic as the master of 'imitation' material. In addition to serving as the dominant secular material, plastic can replicate the transcendence of folkloric beliefs and thought. Longxiang's visual text responds to the symbolic exchange of pre-modern and post-modern minority spiritual worship co-existing with Han-dominated Chinese consumer markets. In the cradle of everydayness and mundaneness, plastic, as a class cultural choice, achieves its individual transcendence in the vast space of consumption and transaction. Longxiang responds to plastic's new relationship to collective memory, national dynamics and material worship through glue-made plastics and bioplastics - the ambiguous coexistence between organic and inorganic substances.