The reason why the artist Lv Shun is so widely concerned and commented is that his paintings represent a special characteristic similar to his own doughty and delicate personality, which is gloomy, sentimental and poetic. His artistic language undoubtedly reflects a new specific case in Chinese new painting in the new century after the extinction of ‘collective unconsciousness’ in the earlier political art, the exchange of painting conception exists in the artist’s effort in restoring the essential value of painting and in emphasizing the personal experience. A personalized artistic language has been clearly expressed.

　　Animals are always the main subjects in Lv Shun’s works, either paintings or sculptures. The artist regards life of animal as an integral part of human activity, yet there are still something confusing in animal, comparatively, human beings only show their animality when they give up knowledge and acquired experiences, except for the shared kindness. That is to say, human beings are always wandering between good and evil, true and false, angle and devil, lofty ideal and unchecked materialistic pursuit. Beyond all questions, human beings are essentially animals, yet only when human beings deny their animality could their self-identity be confirmed. Even the progresses of mankind are based on the relationship between them and animals. Accompanied by the endless entanglement of diseases of human beings and animals, mankind acquired the eternal experimental process confronting diseases and the adapting process constantly improving self-control ability. Only based on the coexisting relationship between human and animal, the cognition of mankind about the unknown world could be varied and promoted. From such a perspective, what Lv Shun revealed with the metaphor of animal is the bestial faces of mankind when they are irrational——desire, greed, madness, nausea, cruelty, treachery and lewdness. As a matter of fact, Lv Shun is not trying to set his works up as original creation in choosing such a way of expression, but attempting to reflect the spiritual dimension of human beings coexisting with animals. In another word, the existence of otherness precipitated the existence of main body. If we observe the image pedigree of animals in the art history, we would easily find that art using animal as a symbol is omnipresent down the ages. From the stone sculpture of ancient Chinese Mausoleum, to the monumental animal sculptures on the Roman Forum, animals were always symbolically reproducing the imperial will and power. Even in modern art history, there is no lack of creations of artists utilizing animals as media. Differing from ancient art, modern artists have more meditations focused on artistic conception, essence and system. We could see the eagle specimens displayed in galleries created by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, the performance of Joseph Beuys titled ‘How to explain art to dead hare’ done in 1965, the 12 horses pulled by the Italian Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis into a gallery of Roma in 1969, the installation of British artist Damien Hirst who anatomized a whole cow into 12 pieces in 1996 and the conceptual art of Chinese artist Xu Bing who used ‘pigs’ as the media. These works emphasized the coexisting and interacting relationship between animal (otherness) and mankind (main body) both conceptually and formally, they also probed into the perplex issues about psychology, morality, faith and limits. Different from western artistic concepts, in using the image of ‘pig’, Lv Shun is not trying to show some kind of abstract concepts, but to express a narration of the reality while giving a metonymy of human irrationality through his skillful usage and blending of symbolism and cynicism, specifically the animality of human beings. His works are transmitting clear reality criticizing information between reality and concept: Human beings are feeling difficult to extricate themselves from the abyss of animal like desire——it seems that human beings are protecting nature, or to say are the symbol and maintenance of civilization, however, the development of human are at the expense of undermining the existing civilization. It seems that such an abyss is gazing at the behaviors of mankind all the way and all such undermining should be ascribed to the desire of human. Lv Shun is just expressing his own interpretation of this phenomenon with a special artistic language.

　　In the solo-exhibition ‘Feast’ held in Today Art Museum in 2009, Lv Shun started to move his attention from painting towards sculpture, while the core of his sculpture is still the animal——pig. He never sees pig as an isolated animal, but the otherness in the coexisting relationship with human beings. In another word, the artist regards the relationship between mankind and animal as a basic philosophical proposition, and it is just because the comparison and distinction between them, that human could confirm their uniqueness. Although Lv Shun showed a cynical attitude in this solo-exhibition, what’s more important for him is to express a metaphorical and symbolic connotation, because Lv has extended the ‘pig’ to be a universal carrier with double references to both ‘society and culture’: On one hand, the artist amplified further interpretation of Chinese culture on eating from ‘pig’, because things to eat are specially paid attention to in traditional Chinese culture, which include micro-political issues in daily life, directly or indirectly, they reflected out problems in Chinese culture, that is to say, culture of eating is revealing the micro cultural phenomena full of happiness, politics, rules, desire, relationship, traps, friendship, exchange and lavishment through daily life. All of these are exposed in reality: the true colors of human beings would be presented on the dinner table. What’s more we could read from ‘Feast’ is that in our society nowadays, those seemingly regular things sometimes conceal a lot of undercurrent, danger and trap behind the so called regular. On the other hand, from the artistic representation, we could see that Lv replaced and dissolved the classic meaning of ‘The Last Supper’ by Leonardo da Vinci with the image of the animal ‘pig’, and then he skillfully appropriated such a classic religious subject into the reflection on mankind’s mental situation today. This is a ‘post-modernist’ vocabulary form and a cynical allegory, ‘pig’ as the otherness is bestowed with more humanized meaning of mankind as the main body; obviously, ‘pig’ has a symbolic meaning. If we compare ‘The Last Supper’ with ‘Feast’, we could feel easy to find the connection and distinction between them. It is noteworthy that in the sculpture ‘Feast’ by Lv Shun, the two figures Jesus and Judah are absent. Undoubtedly, Lv is implying the crisis of human faith. Lv Shun is comparing the plasticity of soul with the flexibility of classic works and trying to conduct audiences to conscious association through their feed back reflection against his defiant and confusing works. This piece of work by Lv Shun not only reflected his personal inspiration, but also transmitted a clear introspection for culture like a motto.

　　Although Lv Shun has done experiments in sculpture, he is still focusing on the creation of paintings. He brought his imagination, judgment, and creativity into full play and established a unique symbolic narrative language——the pictures are covered by dark-blue and deep-green, no sunshine, no colored clouds, and no transparent air are displayed on his paintings, the whole atmosphere is so smothery, constructed a poetic and dreamlike shot. The mysterious blue tone gives out the surrealistic illusion of infinite abyss. Lv Shun’s persistence on painting determined all these unique languages and forms constructed by free lines, bold green, vague dim light and hazy deep scenery, as well as the coincidence with the objects represented. Although the hue of Lv Shun’s paintings is full of fine and beautiful sense of form, behind this representation, information of gloomy, romantic, poetic, broken and rotten is reflected. For example, the withering of flower sometimes implies sex on one hand, yet on the other hand, some inexplicable sadness would be expressed, further more, the floating fog well outlined a sadly beautiful world, while those animals like pigs and cats are located in the evil distant space and constructed a sad and melancholic sense. Therefore, the whole picture is covered by haze. Facing these ‘unique’ paintings, people would feel difficult to accept them both psychologically and emotionally. In ‘Happy Times’ (xingfu shiguang), Lv Shun subjectively depicted pigs as ghosts wandering in the space like the infinite outer space; in ‘The Sound of Nature’ (tianlai zhi yin), he depicted frogs as lives trapped in nature which became the dirty things sunk into the filthy pond. In his ‘Flowers in the Sky’ (kongzhong de huaduo), Lv represented the rotten sense of rose, while in his ‘Lost Landscape’ (xiaoshi de fengjing) and ‘Lost City’ (xiaoshi de chengshi), the artist created a desolate and vast ritual beauty with cold grey and livid color. The ruined city and natural scenery are covered with fog, nonliving and stagnant, as has just experienced a catastrophe, in this horror atmosphere all in still, the only existing cat became the humanized object, its shining mysterious eyes gazed at us like a lonely people or a ghost, made us tremble. Anyway, Lv Shun’s works always have an admonishing meaning that just because the limitless desire of human beings, twisted and terrible results are shaped on this world, and crisis as well as uneasiness are aroused in mankind’s mind.

　　In any case, Lv Shun’s art is undoubtedly a penetration into the complex states of mind of contemporary peoples. He expressed his fable of the nowadays society through his vivid and unique visual language. When we manifest that ‘mankind is a kind of existing form of culture’, we always touch upon the opposite otherness: animal. Such a contact and representation of animals always reflects the extreme fear, agony and sense of loss in mankind either metaphorically or representatively. Lv Shun never gives any answer to the questions of existing, he, however, reminds people to pay attention to the absurd situation of human’s self-existing and their culture through images. Impelled by desire, mankind are slipping into the blind and ever expanding abyss; what we should question and reflect against our culture today is just this point.