In 2020, Wenjue launched her eponymous studio Wenjüe Lu with partner Chufeng Fang as an artist duo. Studio Wenjüe Lu seeks to restore a sense of “slowness” to the ever-accelerating world. Though majored in fashion design, Wenjue seeks to disintegrate fashion, along with the construct known as trend.
The studio shall serve as a multidisciplinary platform integrating the multiple forms of different mediums, a visual and aesthetic way to philosophize, to tell a story, to put out a statement, to disclose truths about oneself. Wenjue and Chufeng are repulsed by the idea of mechanically reproduced commodities, and prefer treating each of their output as individual work of art, made by hand and felt by heart.
Insisting on design and craft on a hands-on basis, Studio Wenjüe Lu devoted itself to emphasizinig the rediscovery and the re-cherishing of craftsmanship and folk spirit while respecting the natural state of different fibers, shades, and textures. Infusing its ongoing exploration of their philosophy of life born within the process into the creations.
We seek to restore a sense of “slowness” to the ever-accelerating world.
Wenjüe Lu was founded in 2020 seeking to recover what is being overlooked by this fast-paced time. Through combining authentic traditions across communities, while retaining their unique historical and cultural significance, with the aesthetic of contemporary art driven by emotive expressions to become an artistic entity that defies singular definition, to become "Neither"— focusing simultaneously and inter-sectionally on studio art, garments, cross-medium collaborations, communal happenings, and cultural workshops. We’re driven by a Daoist worldview, we see what we do as attempts of philosophical inquiries, ultimately.
Our annual garment offerings belongs to one permanent collection. Carried by the likes of Dover Street Market and Net-A-Porter, we also directly offers our creations right here on our site. From cotton, silk, to linen, hemp… Adopting natural-fibered fabrics as one of the various rhetorical devices within the Wenjüe Lu language, our works wish to be embodiments of a Daoist sense of naturalness rather than artificially materialistic goods to be consumed and discarded.
We believe in the eternal companionship between garment and body. What remains in the end returns to the land; the garment collections are made with the intention for each piece to last, with every use, every wear, eventually outliving manufactured despair through our continuously attempts to endlessly repair. Through Wenjüe Lu’s Lifelong Mending Initiative, create ever-lasting memories, with care.
Wenjue Lu & Chufeng Fang
Bio
Using soft sculptures, fiber art in conjunction with dreamscape and poetry, Wenjue Lu and Chufeng Fang function as an artist duo seeking to provoke through the disguised plainness of natural-colored fibers. Born in Beijing and Jieyang, China respectfully, Wenjue obtained her B.F.A. in fashion design at Parsons School of Design while Chufeng obtained his B.A. in media and culture at NYU. They began working together since 2021 under the moniker "Studio Wenjüe Lu", exploring the relationship between stillness, fragility, anxiety, and slowness in an ever-accelerating world.
Artist Statement
“The works produced through our bodies are a result of letting go. We’re repelled by a vision: A giant, constantly spinning wheel that we call "world", fueled by lives strolling through a linear production of history, obsessed with acceleration and accumulation. Kaleidoscopic madnesses. As two human beings, like everyone else, we are inevitably governed by this unbearable thing called ego, so unbearable it dissolves all the desire for us to work as one entity, but to work as none: the bodies as the vehicle and minds as the filter, we lend ourselves to poetry and dreamscapes, we work to carve out a space of Dao, where “Heaven’s Will and Human Affairs Are One”(天人合一). This alternative world, in which human is no longer at the center, also possesses the mundane, the fragmentary, and a newfound slowness. This world can, at the same time but not all at once, be hopeful, dreadful, dreamy, haunting, mesmerizing, bleak, deceitful, or sobering ”
Exhibitions:
Jan 2022 Duo exhibition, Beyorslf Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, US
Feb-Mar 2022 Selected Poetic Transfigurations, LATITUDE Gallery New York, New York, NY, US
Aug 2022 - Mar 2023 Fished, The Canvas at the Oculus, New York, NY, US
Nov-Dec 2022 Desert Dhyāna 禪漠, SSSSS, New York, NY, US
Apr-May 2023 Alternate Side Parking, Starta Arta Gallery, NY, US
May 2023 Playground, Stilllife Art and Design Fair, New York, NY, US
May-Jun 2023 Evertree: Bark (2019), SELENE, New York, NY US
Jun 2023 Horticulture in Circles 圓藝, SSSSS, New York, NY, US
Apr 2024 Destiny vs. Will, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York, NY, US
May 2024 7, the Blanc & Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York, NY, US
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Events:
Dec 2021 Warmth in Beauty: Fou Shop Winter Holiday Market, Fou Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, US
Jul 2022 Of the Virgo - Album Pre-release Art Show, Berry Street Community Garden, Brooklyn, NY, US
Aug 2022 Bonfire 2022 - Peace & Bonfire, Forest Park Bandshell, Queens, NY, US
Dec 2022 Broome Room, Sohotel Art Space, New York, NY, US
Apr 2023 AAAAH!, Soho, New York, NY, US