Your Weekly Mixx – Enjoy! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. Visit the Submissions page for information on how to have your art featured in the Weekly Mixx.
DAF Group Feature: Vol. 118
Your Monday Mixx – Enjoy!
Lu Cong: Painting 2011
The latest work from Chinese-American painter Lu Cong. Born in Shanghai in 1978, Cong immigrated to the U.S. in 1989. After graduating from the University of Iowa with degrees in Biology and Art in 2000, Lu chose to pursue portrait art over medicine. Between 2003 and 2007, Lu was recognized by a number of art publications as a notable emerging artist. Since then, Lu has developed a distinctive look that many has regarded as an original approach to figurative realism. His portraits do not simply capture the physical or emotional likeness of the subject, rather they beckon to establish an authentic engagement – interaction that ensues when one comes face to face with the sensual, the inexplicable, and the unsettling.
Of his work Cong says, “My recent paintings depict young adults, at around the coming of age. I painted them in ways that I feel is most relevant to my experiences. I don’t make art with the overt intension to critique or dissent. However I am aware that what I feel to be authentic is often a reaction against what I feel isn’t. In this case, my approach to painting is in part shaped by my apathy towards the ‘intellectually respectable’ ways of painting; and in part provoked by commonplace and repetitive visuals of ‘mass media.’ My concern when painting is how real it is; not in its actual likeness, but in its immediacy and meaningfulness to myself.” (Vered Gallery)
Check out more of Cong’s work at LuCong.com.
Lu Cong: Painting
Born in Shanghai, China in 1978, and immigrating to the U.S. in 1989, Lu Cong is a Chinese/American portrait artist. Cong graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Biology and Art in 2000. That same year, he moved to Denver in an “effort to delay entry to medical school.” He rented a small studio on Capital Hill and began to teach himself to paint in oils.
In 2005, Cong made Southwest Art Magazine’s annual list of twenty one artists to watch under the age of 31. In 2008 he was named as one of five “Today’s Masters Making Their Marks” by Fine Art Connoisseur magazine.
Cong is regarded by many as one of the “most distinctive young artists to recently emerge from the American West. His paintings center around the faces of his carefully chosen subjects. His style pays homage to 18th Century Romantics, yet it is unmistakably conceived in and relevant to the contemporary era.”
For more information about Lu Cong, visit LuCong.com.
Sources: Artnet