ABOUT — MOMO

Luo Mengmeng

Momo

Mengmeng Luo(Momo) is a Chinese visual artist born in 1999 in Changsha, Hunan province, now living and working in London. She graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design.

Her art works consist of visual image and sound effect. She specialises in creating scene-based fragments of cinematic space that combine to form non-temporal sequential narratives and are characterised by her own personal magical realism and black irony. Based on her past experience as a journalist and film director, much of her work relates to the dissemination of media information under catastrophic capitalism, including perceptual paralysis and extreme social events brought about by technological developments. Her independently directed film Glitch in the Matrix was chosen for the international lift-off film session, got award in 2022 Athens International Film and Art Festival in Greece. This work participated in the Rea art fair in Milan Italy in 2023, selected in the publication of rea art fair 4 edition. This film also seleted in the 18th Arte Laguna Prize exhibition in Venice Italy in upcoming 2024. Her work is in the collection of the Fundación Simón de México.

BIO

Artist Statement

In Mengmeng Luo's early movie image creation, most of the narrative structure came from stage plays, with fixed scenes and non-temporal images as a link, which had some colours of theatrical films in the early twentieth century, focusing on interspersing elements in the story similar to commercial films, playing with editing, and expressing the subject matter of experimental films in the mode of a commercial film.

In this process, she gradually realised the limitations of the cinema screen, and the two-dimensional screen and the exhibition space together constructed a field for conveying information. In the UK, she did a lot of experiments on image and spatial field, constructing some three-dimensional symbols beyond the screen. This includes playing images on a moving advertising vehicle (everything except a dog). She is dedicated to combining film, architectural installations and sculpture. Her current research focuses on the phenomenon of cultural decline resulting from the overloaded dissemination of information brought about by capital, which includes the phenomenon of socially produced weird culture.

Her current project Modalism combines cinematic narrative and field, while the installations placed in the film by the filmmaker often delay or even subvert the operation of the machine in the dimensions of the object, thus presenting the film as a kind of materialised acinéma. The significance of installation art for cinema lies not only in the fact that it is an operable and deployable apparatus, but also in highlighting its own unique materiality, so that the constituent apparatus of the film themselves carry narrative and metaphorical expression, and ultimately transition to the materiality of the film in the sense of the overall installation.

Education

2022

Master of Arts in fine arts------Chelsea College of Art and Design

2017

Bachelor of Arts in Film and Television Director-----Communication University of China, Nanjing

Exhibitions

2023

18th Arte Laguna Prize, Venice, Italy

Rea Art fair, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, Italy

Spectral, London, UK

HEXY art, Fish Island, London, UK

Echoes, St James Parish Church, London,UK