Laurent Martin “Lo” is a visionary French artist renowned for his masterful bamboo sculptures that appear to float or balance with ethereal elegance. Trained as a visual artist in Paris, Lo spent many years working as a creative director both in advertising and fashion before embarking on an art career. His passion for bamboo led him to travel across Asia to study traditional techniques for working with his favorite material. These experiences shaped his distinctive artistic language, enabling him to turn bamboo into installations that explore the balance of light, form and materiality.
“When I first encountered bamboo in 1998, I fell in love with it. Its nobility, balance, lightness, sensuality and energy seduced me immediately,” Lo tells Observer. “I then spent five years studying it, experimenting with its extraordinary virtues, before, in 2004, abandoning my life at the time (in the world of advertising and fashion) to follow ‘Ma route du Bambou (my bamboo route)’ across Asia.” The route passed through India, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos in search of the origins of bamboo.
“Bamboo gave me the opportunity to rediscover a sense of balance and meaning in my life in response to my artistic concerns. Since then, my relationship with him has grown stronger and stronger through an ongoing dialogue,” Lo explains. He allows himself to be guided by it, drawn to its reliability and limitless creative potential.
In addition to its material and spiritual virtues, bamboo is one of the most environmentally friendly plants, thanks to its ultra-fast growth and the way it absorbs carbon dioxide and emits oxygen at a much faster pace than most trees. In Lo’s initial research over the first five years, he had to experiment alone and empirically with its qualities, given that the Western world at the time had little cultural connection or interest in bamboo. Over the next 20 years, with successive travels around the world to meet craftsmen, technicians, architects and great masters of bamboo, he completed his apprenticeship and solidified his own expertise as the material gained wider recognition.
Bamboo embodies seven great virtues—balance, lightness, flexibility, strength, energy, sensuality and spirituality—qualities that also define humanity. “It is the source of Asian wisdom. More than a material, it’s also a life companion,” Lo says. “In addition to the ancestral techniques I’ve learned and the recent technologies I’ve applied, the emotional and spiritual charge of bamboo completes the dialogue I maintain with it daily in my workshop.”
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“I’m always very attentive to the characteristics of the spaces in which my works are installed. They themselves define their own spaces, which include emptiness and fullness, light and shadow, movement and stillness.” This interplay of complementary elements is their equilibrium. To Lo, it’s clear that the spaces where his sculptures are installed play a decisive role. What’s more, the shadows cast on the walls add a fourth dimension—a “calligraphic” reading of his bamboo sculptures.
In his 2024 solo exhibition at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery in Hong Kong, titled “Celestial Equilibrium,” shadows of his works are projected to the white walls of the gallery in different shapes and occasionally intertwine with each other. This new layer of calligraphic shadowing enhances the interplay of tension and movement in the large white cube gallery.
By virtue of his training and his artistic concerns, he considers himself generally an heir to his mentors and masters rather than strongly influenced by a certain individual or style. “I took my first steps without any cultural reference to bamboo. So I developed my own ‘style’ or rather ‘modus operandi.’ This is undoubtedly why my work seems to interest Asian audiences, as they perceive a fusion between Western culture and a material rooted in their own culture, without imitating or copying it,” Lo says. The overall aesthetic of his work stems from his use of a material whose characteristics generate forms that are naturally found in Asian art and architecture.
Since 2013, Lo has been developing a collection of habitable sculptures that define architectural spaces. These pieces, which he calls “Energy Domes,” are, according to him, destined to “clean” the space around us and convert it into an empty zone wherein to meditate and relax. Lo’s titles hint at his artistic intent, but for these rather abstract sculptures, he leaves interpretation up to the viewers. “My work involves the senses, not the intellect. It’s a bit like music, where I don’t have to explain anything.”
Lo’s deep grasp of bamboo’s natural properties, coupled with his exploration of tension, balance and movement, results in works that are both visually striking and spatially profound. Each sculpture in “Celestial Equilibrium” invited viewers on a sensory journey, drawing them into the delicate interplay of material, light and air.
