Lu ShengZhong

The Chinese folk art of paper-cutting is ancient, but Lu Shengzhong's artistic practice, which employs it, is thoroughly modern. His signature Little Red Figure, a slightly devious-looking splayed personage, is as distinctive as a Haring graffiti man, and in Lu's installations, just as ubiquitous. The artist fills a room with the individually replicated form, which seems at once both whimsical and frightening. This catalogue of an exhibition at Chambers Fine Art in New York is a work of art itself, featuring a red paper cover embossed with scissors and one of the red figures. Inside, studio shots reveal Lu Shengzhong's involved work process, and pages from his cutout books are reproduced. This bridge between ancient and contemporary Chinese art is essential for fans of both.

In the 1980s, a number of Chinese artists came into their own, freed from the Cultural Revolution strictures that strictly dictated what was and was not acceptable art. In their search to get beyond classical styles and Socialist Realism, they alternately took their cues from Western Pop or from Chinese vernacular styles. Lu Sheng Zhong went the latter route, and his immersion in the native folk tradition of paper cutting has produced striking formal expressions of ideas both philosophical and religious in nature. First Encounter includes Sheng Zhong's Great Peace and Tranquility and Poetry of Harmony, two floor-to-ceiling scrolls made of lacy, intricate red cutout forms pasted on a black ground. Handsomely stitched together in a traditional Chinese book-binding technique, this book reproduces both planning sketches and the finished work.