Through the lens we see a dancer in front of a fence. There is a wind-tussled sheet hanging behind her. The sound of crashing waves intensifies as the dancer starts to rise from a crouch and into a series of movements, sometimes balletic, sometimes frantic. On the sheet a circle of flowers moves with quick balletic movements. Part performance, part statement, there is something here that is struggling to be understood. Is this itself the message?
Multidisciplinary artist Fanglin Luo’s work takes viewers on a broad journey through ritual femininity and exploratory performance art. These are universal themes that she interprets through performance works that restage powerful cultural archetypes as a form of resistance against patriarchal tropes. But history has deep roots and not all of them bear sweet fruit. The question viewers face is whether her myth (re)making marks true growth.
Having completed an MA in Contemporary Art Theory (2022) at Goldsmiths and winning an award at the The Light From the Other Shore – 2025 New York International Art Competition (Whitelock Art Center), Luo’s recent work draws inspiration from mythological stories from Greece and China. Her performance-based works recall the startling contributions of Joan Jonas and Shigeko Kubota. During the 1960s and 1970s, these artists used performative works to question the construction of self, particularly a feminine self. Jonas’ use of video performance works elevated a female life into an artistic frame that questions assumptions around the construction of experience. Whereas Kubota’s work on film was an exploration of representation. In works like Self-Portrait (1970-71) Kubota used video, a new medium at the time, to create glitching memorials of herself in mysterious action and in doing so took portraiture into a new visual dimension. In the first few seconds of Luo’s ME & GODDESS & ME (Aphrodite Project, 2025) we see her walking through a street, before quickly cutting to Luo in a flesh-coloured leotard, a sheet hanging between her and a sunlit fence. The juxtaposition reminds us, like Jonas and Kubota, that this is a performance that references the real world as a foundation for a new constructed reality.
The reality that Luo focuses on in both parts of her ME & GODDESS & ME series is one based around the central question of how the concept ‘woman’ is constructed. Like media-related artists Cindy Sherman, Dara Birnbaum and Tai Shani, Luo finds that woman is constructed culturally through stories, myths and stereotypes and, like those artists, she finds that whilst the gloss of these archetypes might be limiting, on closer inspection there is a lot at work below the layers of mask. In ME & GODDESS & ME the artist asks:
‘What is a woman?
When I am alone, I’m not a woman
But I’m with them, I am.
Who are they?’
When Simone de Beauvoir posed the question ‘What is a woman?’ in 1949 as the central theme of The Second Sex, she described a series of codified relations that women ‘must’ negotiate as secondary roles to men as a means to exist, let alone be valued (de Beauvoir, 1949). Subsequent writers such as Judith Butler (1990) in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Germaine Greer (1970) in The Female Eunuch have similarly examined gender constructs as both conservative and resistant forces within society. But what is Luo’s take on this? Does she simply rephrase de Beauvoir’s arguments in a contemporary way for a contemporary audience or is it something more?
Accustomed as we are to slick media productions across the ubiquity of social media, of which film and television almost seem like quaint tributaries, Luo’s filmed works feel visceral, immediate and alive. Whilst she often paints and creates works across several mediums, she appears primarily to be a performance artist who reconnects her audience with what she feels are essential energies within the construction of identity by enacting ritual events.
In the Aphrodite project, she performs a dance-based work through which she ‘traces Aphrodite’s transformation from passive beauty to awakened force’ through ‘ritual and embodiment’ (Luo, 2025). The performance echoes the self-actualising sentiments of the aforementioned feminists and indeed Foucault (1980), who argued:
‘…it’s my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which power seizes upon. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.’
Luo’s performance then, with its petalled sheets, boxing wraps and symbolic painting, becomes a statement of the artist claiming her own ‘transcendence’ (de Beauvoir, 1949). She establishes her own system of esoteric becoming, a gnosis. Something she takes further in NVWA PROJECT, where she enacts the transformation of the mythic mother goddess Nvwa (Nüwa, see endnote), who in Chinese folklore created humanity from yellow clay, into an elemental force summoning rain and flowing with intense strength. The performance is at once historically grounded but also current and universal. The feeling and energy of the performance can be understood across the centuries and clearly for the artist is as relevant now as ever. However, myths, stories and symbols all carry their own historical baggage, so the question remains whether reviving old forms isn’t in some way reinvigorating the entrenchment of conservative views. In particular, the ideas of Monique Wittig and the idea of ‘occupying symbols’ are carried forward in Luo’s work where she aims to reclaim and reinterpret those symbols historically appropriated and mobilized by patriarchal structures (such as female deities in religious mythology). Specifically to reconstruct and imbue them with new meanings that serve contemporary purposes of women’s liberation. On one level Luo’s performance could be read as a means of encountering the historical past within an empowering trajectory. The question of who ‘they’ are disappears when traced along internal lines and Luo’s performances of myth aren’t about what they’ve done but the struggle to free oneself from the internal structures that trammel the strength to grow.
In Luo’s ME & GODDESS & ME (2025) series, the myths of Aphrodite and Nvwa reconnect viewers with a universal experience of mythic culture, but also an individuated self. When the psychologist Carl Jung wrote about individuation, he described a journey through which a person incrementally builds themselves towards an ‘authentic’ self by embracing the potentials within. A fan of myths and stories, he saw the importance of these archetypal characters as means to strategise the concept of what we want ourselves to be by appealing to universal truths (Jung, 1953). Something reflected in her choices of myths to perform, as a ‘reflection on how the telling of stories – across cultures – shapes history itself’ (Luo, 2025).
Myths are slippery, contradictory things. In one context a goddess of creation might open pathways; in another they might overgrow, causing choking stagnation. They are, however, interpretative and importantly re-interpretative. Is there a danger that playing with old symbols from patriarchal systems, regardless of how empowered they appear, will entrench the surrounding context? Of course, and yet equally refactoring the power dynamics within a known system, Greek or Chinese, mythology reveals another truth: on a social level power is given and there are a lot more of us than there are of them.
Luo’s work seeks to reclaim myth-making around the idea of female spirit as a way of connecting with discursive forces that define history (Luo, 2025). This is where the specificity of her work takes a wider view. As an artist, she makes a claim that this empowerment comes from a historical basis, a vector that asks not just who they are, but also how we got here. Both Aphrodite and Nvwa capture the spirit of creation myths, personal existential stories that humans have built and rebuilt. In an almost magical fashion, Luo’s work takes the question of ‘What is a woman?’ and ‘Who are they?’ and through the lens of performative myth manifests the asking as a realisation of the answer. As with Jung, de Beauvoir, Jonas, Kubota and Foucault, Luo recognises that in many instances ‘they’ are the focus of normalisation within the self. A necessary realisation which allows the growth of an authentic self derived from the freedom to make a positive choice. As shown by Aphrodite and Nvwa, the ability to create the world starts with recognising the power of self.
Endnote: Regarding Nvwa/Nüwa, the artist asserts that as per the transliteration she learnt in school Nvwa is her preferred way of spelling the mythological figure’s name. Readers interested in the background of the myth are advised to search for information using the more commonly held transliteration ‘Nüwa’.
References
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
de Beauvoir, S. (1949) The Second Sex. Paris: Gallimard.Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books.
Greer, G. (1970) The Female Eunuch. London: MacGibbon & Kee.
Jung, C.G. (1953) The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 12: Psychology and Alchemy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Luo, F. (2025) ME & GODDESS & ME (Aphrodite Project) [Performance art]. Artist statement.
Selected Exhibitions
Wake Up Event 03, Artist, 10–11/2025, 32–34 Osier Way (UK)
The Light from the Other Shore, Artist, 08/2025, Whitelock Art Center (US)
Microverses, Artist, 10/2025, Changting Gallery (Japan)
Zhen Yi Gallery – Scentless Depths, Artist, 09/2025, Sol de Paris Gallery (France)
404 Not Found, Artist, 06–07/2025, Fitzrovia Gallery (UK)
Cheeky London – Launchpad (London Design Festival), Artist, 09/2025, Tradestars Islington (UK)
Huang Contemporary – Untranslated, Assistant Curator, 07/2025, 10 Greatorex Street (UK)
Echo Project, Art Director & Performer, 07/2023, Sabretooth Hoxton (UK)
Anxious Memories, Artist, 05/2022, Goldsmiths College (UK)
Images courtesy of the artist © Fanglin Luo
This review is part of a supported series on emerging artists including Fanglin Luo. Edited by Kailas Elmer
Ex-London based reader of art and culture. LSE Masters Graduate. Arts and Culture writer since 1995 for Future Publishing, Conde Nast, Wig Magazine and Oyster. Specialist subjects include; media, philosophy, cultural aesthetics, contemporary art and French wine. When not searching for road-worn copies of eighteenth-century travelogues he can be found loitering in the inspirational uplands of art galleries throughout Europe.
