一个被埋没的优秀艺术家，一个创造力极其旺盛的怪才。他身上有一种天然的素质：民俗、民族艺术和现代艺术巧妙地熔为一炉，达到了相当的高度。——李小山

      去年夏秋之际，我在昆明。叶永青和毛旭辉都向我谈及一个名叫罗旭的“怪人”。他们用了很多形容词，所以未见面我就有了一个先入为主的印象。初见之下并没有什么特别，一个黑黑瘦瘦的汉子，年龄与我相仿，说话不多也不少，像我结识的许多艺术家一样，说“怪”不怪。——我想等熟悉之后，他的“怪”或许就会如狐狸尾巴一段一段地暴露出来。

      终于，等我了解了这位“怪人”的一些想法后，不禁有点肃然起敬，记得当时我脱口而出问到，这么大的范围和地盘，这么奇形怪状的建筑，这么多的艺术创作，这么大的狗全是你的吗？——说实在话，我真的没有料到在中国还有这样的艺术家，在根本不懂建筑原理的情况下弄出几千平方米的“建筑物”，而在其“建筑物”内堆积了无数由他创作的艺术品：雕塑、绘画、数码作品......我简直难以相信一个人能够具有如此旺盛的精力和体力，除非他吃喝拉撒之外从来不睡觉，否则他怎么会做出这么多活？

      说起他的“建筑”，罗旭似乎有点腼腆，声称自己对建筑一窍不通，但又立即补充，某位美国建筑学家参观过“土著巢”后，指着高楼林立的昆明市区说，如果发生地震，所有的楼厦全部倒塌，“土著巢”仍然会巍然屹立。他这是在证明，“土著巢”虽不是精确计算和严密设计的产物，却是按人对力学概念的直觉判断完成的。从外观上看去，一撮撮一堆堆乳房样的形状很难与“居住”联系起来，倒像土著的祭祀场所或烧陶的窑炉。我没有数过有多少个参差错落的形状有异的“乳房”，只是设想里面的通风采光如何解决。几十米高，围圈大小不一，主要是形状太让人奇怪了，这叫什么建筑啊！——当我走进去，问题似乎一下子烟消云散，而且我马上就喜欢上了这里：石柱、穹壁、花岗岩地面、四通八达的台阶、高高的穹顶......通风、采光全被恰到好处地加以利用，令人怀疑置身于中世纪的城堡，和神话传说中的异域......我不想过多地对“土著巢”进行描述，因为它的异样已超出语言能够表达的范围。我只想说，它是当今最奇特最怪诞的建筑。当初，它的主人是在没有设计图，没有施工方案的情景下，手持一根数米长的竹竿，领着一群民工，依者高低不平的地势，指到哪造到哪......

      罗旭更感兴趣的是雕塑。在他的“土著巢”里，弄不清他究竟捣鼓出了多少作品，成品、半成品、石膏、陶土、油漆、图片、玻璃钢......我看到一堆又一堆的被破坏的作品残骸，——真是惊人的数量。罗旭的雕塑基本上延续了现代主义路数，形式内容很统一，讲究人文内涵，突出作者的思考和感受，手法上显得比较单纯，而表现的精神则十分个人化。罗旭的图式已经形成，女人的腿是他最爱沿用的素材，无论是单个的还是重叠的，红色的还是白色的，都是他用来观照生活及艺术的窗户。另一些作品，同样离不开性别，离不开女人的躯体。当然，他还做过许多烧陶制品，规模巨大。照他的解释，他自己是这些作品的总指挥，就如一个乐队的指挥一样。题材并不决定一个艺术家的思想，但与整个当代艺术的前沿相对照，罗旭在观念上存在着某些距离，他的自我封闭使他高大，也使他迷失。——我不是指他对民间、民俗的迷恋，是指开创性的观念，这是一个玄而又玄的东西，它有个指标：是否具备前沿的性质。

      毫无疑问，罗旭是一位被埋没的优秀艺术家，是一个创造力极其旺盛的怪才。他身上有一种天然的素质：民俗、民族艺术和现代艺术巧妙地熔为一炉，达到了相当的高度。我在结识他的第一时间内就产生了这个强烈的念头，要把他介绍给更多热爱艺术的人，热爱人生的人和懂得人生的人。

A great artist who has been buried away, an extremely creative and twisted talent. He possesses a type of natural talent: folk and ethnic art have been melded together with contemporary art to a high degree.

Li Xiaoshan

Luo Xu and his Earth Nest

Li Xiaoshan

Late last summer while I was in Kunming, Ye Yongqing and Mao Xuhui told me of a freak named Luo Xu. They used many adjectives, so I had a preconceived idea of what I was to expect before we met. On first meeting him, I didn t see anything particularly special, just a dark skinny man, about my age, shorter than myself by about half a head. He didn t talk too much or too little; he was like many other artists I had met before, dubbed strange yet not strange - I was thinking that maybe after I got to know him, his strangeness would slowly start to stick out like the fox s tail.

In the end, after coming to know some of the thoughts harbored by this freak , I couldn t help but feel a deep respect for him. I remember blurting out at the time, "such a big chunk of land, all these strange buildings, all these creative works and all these dogs, are they all yours?" To be honest, I had never thought that such an artist existed in China, one that could build a building structure spanning several thousand square meters without any understanding of architecture. This structure was filled with his innumerable creative works: sculptures, paintings, digital works... I simply couldn t believe that one man could possess so much spiritual and physical power. Aside from eating and shitting, he would have to work non-stop, without rest, or how could he do so much?

When talking about his building , Luo Xu is a bit bashful, pointing out that he knows absolutely nothing about architecture, but immediately adding that after an American architect visited the Earth Nest , he pointed to the skyscrapers of Kunming in the distance, saying that in the event of an earthquake, all of those buildings would collapse, while the Earth Nest would stand firm. This shows that though the Earth Nest was built without accurate calculations or rigid design, there is a definite intuitive insight into the laws of mechanics built into it. When looking at it from the outside, these clusters of strange breast-shaped hovels are hard to associate with a word like residence ; it is much more suggestive of an aboriginal ritual ground or giant kilns. I never exactly counted the number of randomly scattered and misshapen breasts , I was mostly thinking of how to solve the issues of air and lighting. Standing several dozen meters high, this cluster of random shapes and sizes is just incomprehensible, what kind of building is this?! But when I went inside, all of these issues drifted away like smoke from a dead fire, and I instantly came to like this place - the stone pillars, vaulted walls, granite floors, passageways in all directions and high parabolic ceilings... the issues of circulation and lighting are perfectly solved and taken advantage of. This place makes one suspect that they are standing in a medieval castle in the dreamtime of fairytales... I don t want to describe the Earth Nest too much, because its oddness goes beyond that which can be described in words. I ll just say that it is the oddest most peculiar building that stands today. In the beginning, its owner, without any blueprints or plans, led a group of laborers with his long bamboo pole to follow the uneven terrain, erecting buildings wherever his pole pointed...

Luo Xu is even more interested in sculpture. Inside the Earth Nest , it is hard to really tell how many works, finished or half done, that he has hammered out, plasters, ceramics, oil paints, pictures, fiberglass... I saw piles and piles of the remains of smashed works; it was a truly shocking quantity. Luo Xu s sculptures basically expanded further the road of modernism; the shape and content are quite unified, containing many references to the human condition, and full of the creator s thoughts and impressions. The methods appear to be quite purist, and the spirit the works express is highly individualized. Luo Xu s image style has already taken a definite shape. The female leg is his favorite material. Whether one or many, red or white, the legs are the window through which Luo Xu looks at art and life. Some of the other works are likewise intertwined with sex. Of course, he has also done some fired pottery productions of immense scale. As he explains it, he is just the director, and it is just like conducting an orchestra. The subject matter certainly does not decide an artist s entire consciousness, but there is a bit of conceptual distance when he is viewed against the entire front lines of contemporary art. His individual isolation makes him great, but it also causes him to be lost. I am not talking about his infatuation with folkways and customs, but his creative conception. This is a profound and abstruse thing, but it has an index - whether or not it contains the qualities of the front line.

Without a doubt, Luo Xu is a great artist who has been buried away, an extremely creative and twisted talent. He possesses a type of natural talent: folk and ethnic art have been melded together with contemporary art to a high degree. When I first became acquainted with him, I was struck with a strong notion that I wanted to introduce him to more art lovers, more people who love life and more who understand life.