Founding Artist & Creative Lead
b. 1982, Shanghai
Lu Renjie is an independent artist working in painting, ceramics, sculpture and installation. Over more than a decade he has built a single, systematic visual language from the Classic of Mountains and Seas — 809 sculptural forms, 3,407 totems, 420 bronze-script phrases, a long painting with a hidden world and a walkable world model — and applied it to private commissions from the scale of a seal to the scale of a corridor.
- Media
- Painting · ceramic · sculpture · bronze · installation · spatial
- Systems
- 809 forms · 3,407 totems · 420 bronze-script phrases
- Studio & museum
- Shanghai — 1,000+ sculptures, 100+ paintings
- Selected exhibitions
- Shanhai Secret Treasury, Guangfulin Relics Park
- Recognition
- Florence Prize for Literature and Visual Arts · CCTV · Dragon TV
Biography
Born in Shanghai in 1982, Lu Renjie drew and modelled clay from childhood and studied as a young man under Chen Zhaochi. He worked as a magazine illustrator and taught animation for five years before his commissioned works for Jackie Chan brought him a first circle of collectors.
His central project, Lu Renjie's World of the Shanhai Jing, is the first complete physical rendering of the Classic: hundreds of hand-built figures scanned at 0.02 mm and multiplied into a 340 m² terrain, a hundred-metre map, immersive light and a private museum in Shanghai that holds over a thousand sculptures and a hundred paintings.
Alongside the Classic he reads the Book of Changes and the Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic as the other two of 'Three Books' — heaven, humanity, earth — and treats the wider traditions of Chinese civilisation as an expansion layer: literature, bronze, gardens, folk custom, opera, craft. The atelier's rule is his: no walls in the making, no vagueness about the source.
His works are held in private collections in China, Hong Kong and abroad; the 12.8-metre China Dragon is in the collection of a film-art museum; he has received the Florence Prize for Literature and Visual Arts and has been profiled by CCTV and Dragon TV.
Selected historical commissions for Jackie Chan; works held in private collections in Asia, Europe and North America.
Selected works
Shanhai World
A civilisation made physical — over eight hundred hand-built figures, a 340 m² terrain, a world you can walk around.
2012 – ongoingExhibited · Ongoing
Twelve Beauties
Twelve ceramic figures that only make sense together — a reading of Dream of the Red Chamber, held in private collections worldwide.
Series, ongoingPrivate collection · Commissioned
The Shanhai Map
A long field of mineral pigment holding two worlds — one seen in daylight, one revealed only under ultraviolet.
2015 – 2019Exhibited · Private collection