Curator:
ZHAO Yonggang

Judith Sturm (Born in Saar Louis，Germany) and LUE Yi (German, Born in Hangzhou, China) were both master students of Professor Bodo Baumgarten and later became good friends in person.

We are exhibiting two series of oil paintings on canvas from Judith and Yi sharing a common subject matter: people in summer clothes. As a female painter, Judith focuses on zooming in female body parts on big canvases, revealing fine-textured skin and colorful clothes of women in swimming suits while Yi captures an actual scene of a summer beach, realistically showing a place of cultural interest of a certain season and environment.

Judith chooses model-like female body parts with different postures and often uses pink, red, black and grey to develop the figures. The combination of striped or polka dots clothes, high heels and fashionable handbags symbolically suggest the female sexual passion and a typical gender-role behavior. Lue Yi’s characters are mostly placed on the beach, before the different colored blue sky are the old and young, male and female, the choppy and thin, naked or half naked people.. Yi’s works don’t have any suggestions of lust; instead they appear like some random scene in life that you happen to pass by, peaceful and natural.

There’s certain similarity in Judith and Yi’s style of painting. Judith’s styled verism and Yi’s photo realism with features of impressionism form a contrast of insight and outlook on presenting the characters. Judith’s sexual passion focuses on intriguing details instead of the individual while Lue Yi discusses the beauty and short duration of human body from the opposite aspect using scene editing. Such a contrast is questioning us: What are we demanding from our body (and life)? How do we look at the contrast of our own body right and reality of its temporality?