Xiao Lu肖鲁
Born Hangzhou （杭州）, China。 1962
We feel Xiao Lu is one more or less the opening for the Contemporary Feminist Art in China. Graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts High School, Beijing, Lu is most known for her performances. particularly the one called Dialogue, 1989. Two telephone booths are set next to each other, inside, the picture of what it seems a men in one a woman in another. Nobody expected was was about to come. Two shots in the early morning of the opening of Dialogue.
On the 5th of February of 1989, everything is set and prepare for her installation in the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition. Two shots, Xiao Lu shot at her own work. With what intention? Nobody knows. The exhibition is closed, Lu and another artist Tang Song are arrested. Eventually she made it out of China and moved to Australia where she got the citizenship. Nowadays Xiao Lu has confessed she didn't meant to be political, as later she stated in an interview with Tate researcher Monica Merlin, the work was more about her disconnection with men, the installation was an attempt to portrait the different languages that men and women speak.
Nevertheless in the collective memory of those Chinese citizens that called for democracy, Lu was a Hero. The work became political.
The famous 4th of June of 1989. Widely spoke and well remembered in West. Forgot, a tabu, silenced in China, it is scary just to dare to critic the great Communist Party mistakes. We do not talk about how they fail to people. On the 4th of June of 1989, four months later Xiao Lu's performance, Chinese students lead a protest "Pro reform the communist party". They feel they are not heard, they see the tyrant coming. They smell that new dynasty dressed as a Communist model. The response it is a bunch of tanks, firing at the demonstrators. Nobody was heard, the curtain was down and another big black gap in the Chinese history for west. The infamous massacre later called by the Communist Party as counterrevolutionary.
But, what does Xiao Lu has to do with the Tiananmen Square moment. Well, because of her shooting, and the nature of the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition as an open creative expression space, Lu's Dialogue performance it was named “the little Tiananmen Square" or the first shots of the Tiananmen Square .