“Breathing is something about death. We have to inhale as much as we exhale in order to avoid death which is inevitable when we reach the end of our life even if the balance is still well kept then.

Everyone of us, appearing. To be dull and common is doing something unimaginable within the range of our ability.
Why? Is it for love? No, love is far less cool, direct and less violent.
My answer, in this regard, lies in despair of loneliness.
Nothing but loneliness can explore in the ultimate hidden depth of the human nature and drive man to the place that is the most irrational and rational as well.
It is like an abyss, and for most of the time, we cannot afford to ask why.
Lives of silence, death of indistinctness, despair, both weak and strong, permeate our lives.
In spite of all the unpleasantness, please keep your breath.” (Luo Tiantian)

Born in 1983, Luo Tiantian belongs to the Chinese 80s. Compared with their fathers, this generation is much “quieter” because of the walkman, MP3, computer, and the Internet. Unlike their cynical, impulsive and passionate parents, they tend to bury themselves in their own world. The difference shows on one hand the special cultural context along with the social development in China, and, on the other hand, the mentality, dreams and life reality of youth in different ages.

It is not that the 80s show less interest in, fails to understand or to participate in the outer world, but that they have adopted a different life attitude which centers more on personal experience and individual reflection. On one hand, by shutting themselves in their own world, they focus more on their own feelings; on the other, the once infinitely public time and space have been made equally private. Great changes have taken place in means of communication, information and knowledge sources. Youth in this age become consequently both extremely public and extremely private.

Luo Tiantian grew up and finished her school in Sichuan, Southwest in China, where art always enjoys a tradition not easily found in other parts of China--strong concern for the individual and human nature in a concrete form (Symbolism, which was popular in the Southwest in 1970s and 1980s, and Stream--of-Life Art, for instance). This tradition echoes in her art. It might be that the relatively close geographical condition helps people there to reflect more on the self and life itself. In Luo Tiantian’s works, the shift from group to individual, from social experience to that of the individual, moreover, shows the cultural tendency amid the social development in China.

Luo Tiantian belongs to the only--child generation, who, by describing via art their growth, life, emotion, dilemma, give a sensitive and truthful representation of their life reality in the contemporary world--the realistic art of the only--child generation is thus formed. As a complicated psychological model based on self-awakening, “the only-child reality”, when employed in art, takes the form of strong expression of individual experience and indicates that artists, instead of focusing mostly on the great visible social and historical changes and events, are returning to explore and express the rich individual life story and emotional experience in the broad context of a contemporary world-we are nobody other than ourselves.

The subjects in her works are typical of this generation--kind, simple, delicate, sensitive, disoriented, lonely, fanciful, hesitant, self-caring and taking the absolutely perfect world of self as their ultimate ideal. Such aesthetic experience of perfection is derived from their much too comfortable life reality as only--children. Her paintings, however, are not limited to the blissful paradise of the current world, and, they seem to be description of the different lives of the generation, even with a poetic and philosophical tragedy in addition to a quasi-religious tragic sense. The girls of the 80s definitely have their own quasi-religious artistic conception, which is more or less illusory romanticism, remote, empty and alienated.

“My works are more than brief representation of my own experience, and they are direct reflection of the 80s as a generation-metaphors of the self with loneliness and illusion. ‘Loneliness becomes probably a key world for the description of the youth.’ The rich variety of feelings and thoughts lead to our particular personalities and fantasies, which, therefore, defines our art: depending on ourselves and facing the free virtual life. Growing up in the spoiling shower from our parents, we get too much material comfort, but become hyper-sensitive, simple and aesthetic. Unlike our parents, we are light-hearted, disoriented and lacking in a sense of belonging, which probably constitutes our fortune, but it might be our misfortune as well.”  (Luo Tiantian)