Luying Dong’s shift from the stage to visual art is a trip paved by wonder and invention. Sparked by an obsession with harmonising technology and imagery into live acts, she’s carved out a style that stitches age-old techniques into cutting-edge ideas. Her work wrestles with where we belong and how we relate, refusing tidy labels to drop audiences into vivid, kinetic realms instead. As both a projectionist and a visual artist, she sears haunting visuals into the heart of performances, turning abstraction into something you can almost touch.
From gallery photography in New York to experimental installations for London’s theatres, Luying’s projects map her evolution. A patchwork of influences sharpens her vision—one that merges storytelling’s raw ache with the physicality of live art. This alchemy doesn’t just define her voice; it pulls others into her lifelong hunt for what stitches us together.
Red
Luying’s Red series burns with cultural soul-searching and primal feeling, treating the colour as a weapon and wound. Each frame grapples with suffocation and release, slashing crimson against the skin to stage silent rebellions. Cracked paint and cling-wrap morph into metaphors—trapped breath, stubborn hope—while smeared pigments dissolve reality into something feverish. These images don’t just depict struggle; they make your pulse race.
Anchored in Chinese symbolism yet fiercely modern, the work tangles folklore with private battles. One shot tells a tale of fables; another screams a secret. By keeping details half-hidden, Luying tosses viewers a puzzle—What’s your story here?
Verdant Embrace
Verdant Embrace lays bare the delicacy of interpersonal relations in a reality flooded by screens. Stripped to essentials, the video art lingers on two bodies meshed in a quiet clutch, their forms cradled by emerald leaves. The humming foliage hums with a hunger for real intimacy—the kind that fractures when phones buzz. Their unhurried, fragile, deliberate sway hints at how to trust blooms once we shut out the digital noise.
The imagery heightens this dance through intense shadows and a sealed, greenhouse-like world. This tiny Eden shields them from the frenzy out, echoing our craving for pockets of serenity. As scenes melt from crisp to gauzy, the work nudges us to ask: What do we lose when we never look up? Less elegy than a manifesto, Verdant Embrace insists that connection survives in life’s uncurated moments—the ones we feel, unfiltered.
Beijing Opera
Luying cracks open tradition with Beijing Opera, honouring its history even as she prods its seams. Her monochrome photos crackle with performers mid-roar—their iconic makeup and robes stripped of colour to expose sweat, calluses, and history’s burden on living shoulders. Close-ups strip away grandeur: a trembling lip, a scarred knuckle, the human beneath the myth.
Wider shots freeze figures in barren spaces, their poses hovering between ritual and revolt. Here, heritage isn’t static—it’s a shouting match between what was and what’s next. By seizing these variances, Luying doesn’t just archive an art form; she asks us to hear its heartbeat, alternating with the same fight to stay alive that haunts all fading customs.
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