Born: 1962, China
Died: NA
Country most active: China, Australia
Also known as: 肖鲁
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
The 1989 the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition was shut down only two hours after it opened because Xiao Lu suddenly shot her own artwork with a pellet gun. Although intended as an artistic statement, the act made her an inspiration for China’s political and cultural activists. In the charged political atmosphere, her gunshots became known as the “first gunshots of Tiananmen” as the massacre at the square happened just four months later. In 2014, she said in an interview, “I created the work out of personal feelings, but this work became interpreted with political meanings…I don’t reject this. I’ve come to understand that with this work, making it for myself is one thing, but how it is interpreted is also a big part of it.” She and her partner Tang Song were both arrested, and she emigrated to Australia. For 15 years, it was assumed that Song was the one behind the act, until Lu publicly stated that it was solely her work, not instigated or planned by her boyfriend. There was swift and intense backlash from the Chinese art community, accusing her of being bitter following their break-up. As Gao Minglu writes, “The revision was perceived as going against the whole established history of avant-garde art, against authority, even against patriarchal society. Therefore, Xiao Lu’s revision lost her the former sympathy towards her. The avenging actions of lovelorn woman did not involve any question of justice. Even within the inner core of the ‘avant-garde’, whose calling is rebellion as such, Xiao Lu’s revision encountered enormous obstruction.”