Luo Mingjun (*1963, Nanchong, China) is an internationally acclaimed and highly regarded artist who explores the notions of identity and memory. Her mastery extends to various mediums and techniques, including oil painting, watercolour, Chinese ink, lithography, pencil, charcoal and also photography. Her art is an expression of her life experience, the interweaving of her Chinese origins and her new Swiss roots.

She studied fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts of Hunan Normal University from 1979 to 1983, specialising in oil painting. In the same institution, she worked as an assistant drawing teacher, earning the prestigious Hunan Province Award in 1984. The following year, she co-founded the “Group 0 Art”, a collective of avant-garde artists that contributed to the Chinese art scene.

The year 1987 marked a crucial turning point in her life when she married a Swiss citizen and subsequently settled in Bienne. This significant change generated a combination of diverse and contrasting emotions. On one hand, it was painful due to the loss of her Chinese nationality while acquiring Swiss citizenship. On the other hand, such situation produced a keen curiosity to explore and a desire to assimilate a new environment with other customs. This process of adaptation transformed into an internal challenge, leading Mingjun to reflect on her own identity and her Chinese cultural heritage. However, according to the artist herself, despite her earnest efforts to absorb and assimilate the Western culture, she ultimately defined herself as a “critical outsider" of both.

Just three years after moving to Switzerland, Luo Mingjun decides to abandon oil painting and devote herself to a practice she learned in China but never fully explored: Chinese ink painting, specifically delving into Chinese calligraphy. This choice, clearly tied to the issue of identity, signifies a rejection of the imported and imposed Russian academicism in China, opting instead for a return to her Chinese roots and this ancient traditional culture. The series “Break Up”, which the artist began producing in 1998, showcases her personal experimentation with Chinese ink, reinventing it through nearly abstract representations that resemble constellations.

Later, in 2006, Luo adapts this technique to a more figurative and everyday context, naming the new series of works “Petites choses”. Depicting kitchen utensils and primarily feminine objects such as handbags, lipsticks, nail files, and so on – labeled by Mao as "sweet weapons” (Armes sucrées) and capitalist temptations – the artist values them as symbols of freedom and femininity.
In 2008, she reinterpreted personal photographs (exposed in which exhibition “Une goutte d’eau dans l’océan”) using a unique painting technique, inspired by Chinese ink, but functioning oppositely. Therefore, instead of black ink on white paper, the artist employs white paint on untouched canvas, preserving the fundamental elements of the first technique - fluidity and support as an essential part of the composition. It is a harmonious fusion of light and shadow, yin and yang.

Although it was initially a tough challenge to rediscover herself and her artistic language in this occidental reality, Mingjun succeeded in discovering and making her own neutral space, which she found in her atelier, where there is the chance to exchange and reflect, a third country.

Luo Mingjun has successfully distinguished herself in the art world, garnering recognition through a series of prestigious awards, art fairs and exhibitions across Asia, Europe and Australia. Her notable achievements in the canton of Berne include the Ernst Anderfurhen Prize in 1994 and 1996, the Frauenkunstpreis Berne in 2008, and the “Here and Elsewhere” grant in 2017. Key milestones in her career include solo exhibitions at renowned venues such as the Creek Art Center in Shanghai (2006), Centre Pasquart in Bienne (2008), and Musée d’art de Pully (2016).

Her artworks are not only documented through publications on her past exhibitions - for instance “ici et maintenant” at the Pully Art Museum and “Poussière rouge” at Kunsthaus Centre d’art Pasquart - but also find a place in esteemed private collections, notably the Uli Sigg Collection.