Tingting (Rannie) Lou

Tingting (Rannie) Lou is a contemporary Chinese artist born in 1995 in Ningbo, Zhejiang and has studied art since childhood. She enrolled in the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, one of China's eight major art academies, in 2014 to study basic traditional sculpture characterization. She studied Western art and cultural history, Western philosophy, and contemporary art and design as an exchange student in 2016 at the Academia di Belle Arti di Firenze, Polimoda Fashion School, and Università degli Studi di Firenze. She began experimenting with different materials and conducting interdisciplinary art research and practice. She moved to London in 2021 to pursue a master's degree in sculpture at the Royal College of Art, where she was involved in artistic creation. She currently resides in London, and her installation works have been shown in group exhibitions in Shanghai, China, Florence, Italy, and London, United Kingdom. Her group art publication "Wild Stone" has been acquired by the Tate Archive, the Van Gogh House, and the Freud Museum.

Her work has a dystopian quality. Her artistic practice is often inspired by the stories she shares with her family. Using fairy tale language, she combines the abstract art world with the rational real world. Lou's work includes painting, sculpture, installation, and performance art. Her works actively challenge traditional sculpture, and her research begins with situational embedding, permeability, and drama, all of which can stimulate people's imaginations and enhance interactivity. It also includes studies and experiments on site-specific art theory to develop a systematic and multidimensional sculpture work. In this system, she is adept at transforming the audience's role from that of a viewer to that of a participant through dramatic artistic expressions. Moreover, her sculptures are presented in a narrative manner, in which the audience is also a part of the exhibition.

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Degree Details

My installation's theme involves building a spiritual refuge with childlike interest. My work is like an autobiography but always set in a fictional fantasy world. What I no longer wish to face is stored there and portrayed in a dystopian, anti-utopian, theatrical manner. This escapism format piqued my interest. My creative inspiration has always been the memory of my childhood growth, and many elements in the installation have a strong bond with my family. It was the result of my emotional estrangement from my family. I am passionate about creating site-specific art by combining the imaginary world of fairy tales with the rational real world, an interdisciplinary work that combines sculpture, theatre, and multimedia.

Audience participation is crucial to sculpture and artistic installation in my artistic philosophy or practice. Sculpture or installation art can be considered experiential art, emphasising the work's experience rather than merely an object for viewing. Audience participation is essential to this experience because it engages the audience as active participants in creating meaning. Furthermore, this three-dimensional art form has the potential to break down barriers between the audience and the art world. By inviting the audience to participate in the work, a more inclusive and accessible experience can be created, allowing them to establish a deeper connection with the work. It can sometimes be attributed to the collaboration between artists and audiences, which enables the audience to feel a sense of shared ownership and a more profound sense of artistic community in the artistic work.

Miss Bunnies Under the Gaze

The project addresses the role of animal intervention as a tool in family relationships, inspired by my childhood, when my parents killed and cooked my best friend, a rabbit, and led me to eat it by mistake. Its goal is to elicit thoughts about the alienated relationship between humans and animals: creation, killing, companionship, instrumentation, and abandonment. It concludes that females and animals are socially constructed as objects for "pleasing" based on an ecofeminist analysis of the hierarchical relationship between humans and animals and between males and females. The flesh represents the objectification of females and animals. The standing lamp in the work's furniture is a metaphor for the aggressive roles of humans, patriarchs, and males. The lamp's light is a metaphor for aggressive characters' gazes, parents' gazes on their children, humans' gazes on animals, and males' gazes on females.

Suspected of Murder

Medium: Silicone, Fabric, Metal, Wood, Plastic

Size: 250cm × 250cm

Three Little Pigs

The project is aiming at expressing my complicated feelings when I struggled between the fairy tale and reality. Those painful and unreal experiences also make me feel I belong nowhere at all like a ghost. To express my feelings and emotions appropriately, I created an open, immersive, and sequential space that is primarily composed of two areas – multi-screen display area and sculpture exhibition room. These two areas also symbolize the virtual world and the real world. Space invites audience interference and engagement with the sound and moving images, which could break the constraints of their imagination and involve them as co-designers. They are encouraged to re-create the artwork and engaged in the creative process. The sculpture, space, audience, and designer consolidate a new system that could continually bring out inspirations and explore the unforeseen challenge.

The inspiration came from my tenacious fight against cancer. In 2018, a sudden cancer diagnosis threw me into caring unprepared. After a five-hour surgery, I was suffering great pain and expecting parents to accompany me. But instead, my grandmother was asked to take care of me by my very busy mom. To comfort me, she told me a story of Three Little Pigs with her gentle voice. But she didn’t know that the fairy tales reminded me of my painfully lonely childhood without parent participation and tore me apart from the sweet story. The growing perplexity and anxiety between the real world and fairy tales resulted in my psychological gap. And at that time, those little pigs were my only emotional anchor. The collision of those complicated feelings and memories dragged me into the lines between the real world and the virtual world.

Three Little Pigs — The video was composed of five individual paragraphs. Each short section was average 2.5 minutes long. The three cute pigs in the movie is an imitative projection of mine. They sometimes work independently, sometimes love to share, sometimes they argue with each other. However, they are never able to escape the space and controlled by my subconsciousness. They continue their depressed life with repeated processes.

Medium: Wood, Plastic, Steel, Clothes, Fabric, Stainless steel, Carpet, Stones

Size: 400cm × 500cm,

In Vain

This project described my multiple experiences when I failed to break the encirclement and was trapped in dilemmas. I made twelve human-like dolls without the five sense organs by using rough fabrics. Then I placed them in a circle on the rooftop in a building. The circle represented my dilemma while the twelve dolls stuck in their individual predicaments. Besides, I used modern skyscraper as a natural background in order to demonstrate that the dolls could not get rid of the social rules. In the centre of the dual- plight, I placed a short rope to indicate a broken relationship between human behavior and behavior value, which makes our efforts in vain.

This project was based on my inspirations from my dramatic life. After surviving from a terrorist attack in Paris, unexpected cancer, and a car accident, I experienced the constantly changing of life and how frail our human beings are when confronted with a dilemma. In the past, human development was led by historical progress. Most of the time, we cannot change anything but compromise to the change of times. In retrospect, in our modern life, we got paid for our hard work and survived in society according to the social rules. “No work, no pay” is a rule to regulate our behaviors and constraint our minds.

Medium: Synthetic cloth, Plastic, Hemp Rope, Thread, Linen

Size: 400cm × 500cm

Instrumental Ensemble

Sleep, for me, is either a start for a new brand day or an end to life. Thus, I used this project to present the cycle of life and death. I decorated the space with red lights to simulate the internal environment of the uterus. A video repeated to play the photos from a performance art that described how we breathe during our bedtime and let the flickering images settled into the rhythm of breathing. In addition, I also placed four beds vertically in the room in the shape of a fetus and hung the paintings on each bed, which all described the new life. The interior design identified the progressive relationship between giving birth and being given life. I also lay on the bed and kept the sleep mark on the bed sheets to symbolize the time. The project is my imagination of infinite life.

I was inspired by my nostalgic memories when my parents brought with me to sold products on a market stall. Though I slept in a plastic foam box, I felt safe and comfortable. Since then, I got used to wrapping myself in a satin sheet in order to have a good dream. I felt like I was returning to my mother’s uterus. Though sleep is the twin of death, my fantastic experience allowed me to forget the life and death, and enlighten my sensibility of infinite life.