ABOUT DAISHI LUO
Luo Daishi is an interdisciplinary artist blending bio-art with traditional Chinese culture, using copper as her primary medium. She pioneered the Copper Color system, employing biological logic and her "Out of control within control" approach to create vibrant, evolving copper alloy surfaces. Her practice spans field research, sculpture, installations, and videos, delving into themes of technology, nature, and humanity.
Holding an MFA from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (2016), Daishi founded Studio MÁNMÁN and is a guest lecturer at the China Academy of Art. Her projects, funded d by the China National Arts Fund and Shenzhen C Foundation, have been exhibited at venues such as Château de La Colle Noire (FR), the V&A Museum (CN), and Design Miami (US). Her works are collected by institutions and brands including Luo Zhongli Art Museum, the China Geological Museum, Rong Design Library, Dior, Audi, and Lancôme.
RESEARCH
In recent years, she has experienced and fused various fields into practices such as chemical engineering, bronze counterfeiting, industrial manufacturing, microorganisms and Chinese painting techniques, gradually building a unique method of naturally growing colors on the copper surface — Out of control within control — so that the creative production can be carried out by nature, for nature and with nature. “Control" refers to the conditions and final guidance for creating the growth of works, such as setting appropriate temperature, humidity, reaction to medium, generation path and other factors. "Out of control" is to deliberately give up control in control and let the material grow spontaneously in the setting. Finally, control (human) and out of control (nature) jointly create imaginative colors, textures and pictures.
HD single-channel film, sound, color, 1min 33sec
The Nuture & Growth approach urges Daishi Luo to explore its possibilities of forms. For example, Seed records the growing progress of colors by the techinique of time-lapse photography; 72 Hours is a painting installation where I explore the interference in color growth by the external environment and human behaviors; and New Ore is an experimental combination of industrial manufacture and oraganic process. COPPER COLORS, or copper color library, is a long-term research project — is to extract the methods behind color as data, build a sustainable color universe in the form of database, and explore all possibilities of copper growth. This project involved field studiesand experiments at multiple levels, from animals and plants to minerals, from farmers to craftsmen, and from plagiarism to laboratories, etc. Each of the 522 colors in the library carries its own growing process , in which more possibilities are yet to come through the fission and fusion within the system.
Using the logic of experimental creation in the art of biology to create, is not only to study the physical matters of nature and the possibility of collaborative creation between human and nature, but also to challenge the conventional idae of creation, which revolve around human. Faced with the challenges of climate disasters, global epidemics, loss of biodiversity and loss of empathy for each other, if we could transform human-centered creation into nature-centered creation and combine top-down form generation with bottom-up biological growth, can we conceive of the possibility of new and sustainable growth design?
WORKS
