Dialogue
Xiao Lu
肖鲁
Production date
1989
Object Detail
Media
C-type print
Measurements
80 x 120 cm
Notes
In February 1989, for the first exhibition of contemporary art to be held in the China Art Gallery, now the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, Xiao Lu presented the installation that had been her graduation piece at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. It consisted of two telephone booths, with a male person in one booth and a female in the other. Between the two booths, a telephone on a plinth, its receiver dangling off the hook, was intended to symbolise the impossibility of communication between men and women. At the opening, Xiao Lu entered the exhibition hall, took out a pistol that she had secretly and illegally acquired, and fired two shots into the mirror behind the installation to signify a further rupture in communication. She was arrested and detained, and the exhibition was closed. The act catapulted Xiao Lu into permanent notoriety and the events surrounding it came to symbolise the end of a brief period of artistic and creative freedom in China during the 1980s.
Accession number
2007.076