BmoreArt

The recent pieces are very large in and of themselves—more than five feet in diameter. They will be part of a larger group of paintings inspired and thematically linked by Bach’s Fugue in C Minor to be mounted later this year as a solo exhibition at Florida’s expansive Artis-Naples visual and performing arts center. The exhibition may be modest in title, Linling Lu: Fugue in Three Voices, but it is vast in ambition. Lu’s own artistic responses interweave with the three independent voices of the great composers Beethoven, Dvořák, and Stravinsky into a unified whole on a scale that, in Lu’s description, rivals the impact of symphony.

But while music is clearly a dominant voice in Lu’s work at the moment, and has been at least an undercurrent throughout her life and career, the other harmonic elements underpinning and interacting with it are as rich, varied, and complex as her palette.

Lu was born and grew up in a small city amid the lush mountains of Guizhou Province, China. Her earliest memory is of the interplay of light, color, and water in a river near her aunt’s house. She fondly recalls the many afternoons she would return home from school to watch from her parents’ westward-facing apartment, all alone before they arrived home from work, as the color of the sky transformed endlessly with the setting of the sun.

Born under China’s one-child policy, Lu grew up without siblings. Though she spent plenty of time with the other kids in her community, and with family, shuttling between her grandparents’ home and her own, she developed a relationship with—and appreciation for—solitude early in life.

“How I look at solitude,” she says, “is that it’s an opportunity to hear yourself singing. You can hear your own voice from inside, and you develop that voice and encourage it to grow without worrying too much about other, outside voices.”

Outlets for expressing Lu’s inner voice came early on, as she began studying classical piano at the age of four, and began drawing around that time as well. The two modes of expression felt intertwined to her from the start. “When people asked me what I wanted to do in the future, I always said pianist and painter at the same time,” she says. “I didn’t see the difference until I was much older.”

If there was tension among the external voices in her world, it was born of the differences between the well-intentioned perspectives of her father and grandmother on how best to ensure a fulfilling life. Though her father loved music, played the violin-like erhu, and was close friends with artists, he perceived that way of life as spiritually rich but challenging in terms of money and security.

Her grandmother, on the other hand, with whom Lu spent most of her time as a child, encouraged Lu to simply be brave, do what felt important and true to herself, and let the rest fall into place on its own. She came by her point of view honestly; amid the tumult of World War II, with Japanese bombers continually flying overhead. She tracked down the man to whom she was engaged but from whom she had become geographically separated via a distant address on a letter he had sent. Traveling to an entirely different province on foot and by bus, with little money, she finally reunited with him and started the family that would, decades later, result in the birth of Lu herself.

When it came time for college, Lu initially followed her father’s recommendation to enroll in the Beijing Forestry University’s landscape architecture program. It didn’t take, but she met her future husband, the accomplished landscape artist Xiaoming Liu, at the university before transferring to the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) to complete her undergraduate and then master’s degrees.

While still in Beijing, Lu found her personal hero in Georgia O’Keefe and acquired a new language for expressing her ideas about the intersection of music and visual art in the theories of Vassily Kandinsky. At MICA, she studied under her most influential mentor, painter Timothy App, as well as Ken Tisa and Joan Waltemath, and with the Baltimore-based digital music experimentalist Jason Sloan. She also participated in a class called MICA and the BSO, led by Pat Alexander, who organized a group exhibition of pieces responding to performances by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

And, while Lu says she was more focused on the geometrical, mythological, narrative, and other more theoretical elements of the art she was making at the time than on music (“Music hadn’t become loud yet,” she says), it was also at MICA, in one of her moments alone, that the inspiration for what would become One Hundred Melodies of Solitude struck.

“I feel like the signal was sent to me, the symbol,” she says. “Something is told, and I just have to continue to develop it and really, really understand what it means along the way.”

She and Liu married in 2013, after her graduation from MICA. She was represented by a gallery for several years, but recently she and Liu decided to take a leap into the unknown and start their own gallery, Arting, in 2022, to showcase her work and that of other experimental artists in Baltimore and the region. It’s just down the hall from her studio, in another bright, airy, expansive space.

From there, things started to snowball in ways both well-earned and wild. One piece was acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art and another selected for a two-year exhibition at the Walters. Several were purchased by Louis Vuitton, for display in their worldwide signature stores, and by the Grammy-winning music producer Greg Wells and the Tony and Grammy-winning Hamilton music director Alex Lacamoire. (“Musicians seem to get my work immediately,” Lu says.)

At one point during the run of a solo show at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, featuring an installation designed in response to Philip Glass’s Etude no. 16, the exhibition manager called to say that Glass himself had shown up, unannounced, to see what she had created.

Lu and Liu live in Owings Mills with their two children, but spend much of their time working out of their spaces in Woodberry. Most days, Lu can be found visualizing her ideas on her computer, painstakingly mixing pigments to achieve the precise chromatic gradations she envisions, and drawing her circles on canvas with a huge old expandable compass. Over the course of two to four months of carefully applying layers of acrylic—so many that she frequently loses count—the artist subtly adjusts the relationships among the colors until she has achieved her desired result.

She likens the process to tuning a piano, but it’s her own intuition that tells her when each piece is complete, when all of the elements she has brought into relationship within it are in harmony at last.