Fang Lu

Rotten, 2011

16 min



Fang Lu graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts before studing in New York (School of Visual Arts) and completed her master’s degree at the San Francisco Art Institute. She currently lives in Beijing.



Fang is intested in video art, which is at its infancy in China, because it functions between the worlds of film and art. It exists outside the normal narrative structure of films.



Rotten is a performance aimed to visualize and aesthetics cooking food without eating it.  Fang says in an interview with Fiona Hay: “The status quo of women in
our society is the constant pursuit of eternal beauty and immaculate perfection, which of course contradicts the changes taking place in the body internally. In Rotten, I set up a visible process to expose what should have been consumed internally on the surface of the body as an alternative to ‘eating.’ Perhaps it was due to the non-industrial nature of such ‘cosmetics’; once the make-up artist finished adorning the model, the model seemed to have returned to a primitive state. Moreover, after a few hours of filming, the heat from lighting the scene catalyzed a faint rotting scent from both the food and the body at the scene.”