Asia
Lu Chunsheng
History of Chemistry I
2004
History of Chemistry I
A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory. Using long shots and atypical settings, Lu Chunsheng enigmatically refers to a distant history while conveying the sense of dislocation wrought by successive stages of modernization. The combination of elaborate landscape shots from the suburbs of Shanghai and Lu’s signature style of spare and minimally crafted acting offers a surreal view of human behavior in spaces marked by the hulking remnants of China’s extraordinary development.
Lu Chungseng is an artist working primarily with photography and video. Lu's interest in breaching the boundary between documentary and fiction is a particularly generative and defining dimension of his practice. His work is deeply inspired by and rooted in his immediate surroundings and the city of Shanghai, where he lives and represents in counterintuitive, paradoxical and disorienting ways, often void of people. Drawn to the documenting of eerie, bizarre situations, Lu produces films that address political realities filtered through the genre of film noir and detective movies. Commonly shot in black and white, the resulting narratives are always non-sequential and absurd, as he imbues them with both an amusing Surrealism and a disturbing sense of fragmentation and alienation.