Ge Yulu, the Artist Who Turned His Own Name Into a Street Name, Is Still Making Art

"Art reflects its era — the times you live in shape the work you make."

At 11:26 a.m., four minutes before the talk was due to begin, Ge Yulu walked into the ground-floor lobby of the East Hall of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre with his two fellow guests. He wore a dark hoodie and long trousers, a black backpack slung over his shoulders; his fringe fell across his forehead and his hair covered the back of his neck — the easy, grinning look of a student. Only when he stepped onstage and took the middle of three chairs did the audience realize he was the day's main attraction.

This was a satellite venue for the ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. The panel was titled The Story of Sculpture — In Search of Ge Yulu.

The other two participants — Lu Sijia, a culture-and-arts reporter at The Paper, and Zhu Fan, editorial director at Yuntu New Media — were less guests than moderators. They steered the conversation in turn toward three of Ge Yulu's better-known works — Ge Yulu, Eye Contact, and Donghu Station — asking him to walk through each one, before raising a recent press article and asking about his current circumstances.

That article, published on November 7, had left Ge Yulu feeling somewhat glum. Headlined "The Ge Yulu Whose 'Ge Yulu' Street Sign Was Torn Down: I Want to Apply for Security Guard or Food Delivery — Quite Artistic," it spent considerable space painting his straitened life after the "Ge Yulu incident." Perhaps by way of reply, he laughed as he closed the panel: "Right now I just want to focus on making work. I don't want to be disturbed by too many outside voices."

Ge Yulu the artist regards public reactions to his work — press coverage included — as part of the work itself. But that does not mean reality never troubles him.

Like most viral news stories, the heat around the "Ge Yulu incident" passed in a flash. In the nearly 400-square-metre forum space, only about fifty people had scattered themselves about; by the midpoint of the talk, most had already left. They had drifted in out of mild curiosity, with no idea who Ge Yulu was. Four students from the China Academy of Art's traditional Chinese painting department happened to pass through, listened for less than fifteen minutes, then headed upstairs to see the main show. Two employees in their twenties at foreign firms had just come from the Hang Lung Plaza across the street; they spotted the colourful banners strung outside the Shanghai Exhibition Centre and stepped in to browse and rest. Li Yang, a freelance artist, sat in the back row with his mother, simply looking for somewhere to finish their ice lollies.

On November 13, Beijing Daily reported that in the wake of the "Ge Yulu" incident the city had launched a thorough audit of unnamed roads, having "screened 23,000 roads and identified 1,958 unnamed or irregularly named roads, which will be standardised in three batches. The first batch of 309 road names has already been published."

But people may barely remember, by now, the man who tried to claim a street for himself. Perhaps the news runs too fast and too thick; most never paid attention in the first place.

I

In 2013, while studying for a master's degree at the Central Academy of Fine Arts' School of Experimental Art, Ge Yulu began attaching self-made signs bearing his own name to unnamed roads around the city. In 2014, the "Ge Yulu" street sign near Baiziwannan Road in Chaoyang District was picked up by map apps, and he started producing more official-looking road signs to reinforce the concept. He turned the whole process into his graduation work, Ge Yulu, shown at the graduate exhibition in May of that year. Two months later, a Zhihu user named Special K mentioned the piece in a thread asking "What skills look deceptively simple but anyone can actually do?" — the answer went viral, and coverage in Beijing Youth Daily and on CCTV followed.

"What I wanted to explore was how an individual can carve out a space for personal imagination within the city. And there was also a small hope — that society might meet this with an open, tolerant attitude," Ge Yulu said in an interview with Renwu magazine in July.

On July 13, the Ge Yulu sign was removed; ten days later, the spot received an official "Baiziwannan Road" sign in its place.

Of the two removed signs, one was kept by Ge Yulu's thesis supervisor, the other taken by the chengguan (urban management officers). "They took it, but didn't destroy it, and haven't responded to me — so I suppose the chengguan have it in their collection now," he explained at the forum.

The incident sparked wide debate: about the boundaries of art, who has the right to name a road, the fine-grained management of cities, the line between private and public space. Some said what Ge Yulu did couldn't be called art at all; others said art must not break the law; still others thought the young man had real talent — that he was like a hacker, using his practice to expose bugs in the urban system.

For about a week, Ge Yulu was among the most-searched trending keywords on both Zhihu and Weibo. A study-abroad agency offered to sponsor a residency in Italy; someone offered to buy his name outright; someone else built a "Ge Yulu Road" in VR. A fellow CAFA graduate who ran a Taobao shop listed Ge Yulu T-shirts in his "Jieyou Grocery Arts Store" for 99 yuan each. There were two versions: one showing Napoleon on horseback holding a "Ge Yulu" sign; the other placing the sign at the centre, ringed by four characters reading "the road lies within." The shopkeeper declined all interviews, but wrote in the product description: "Ge Yulu existed for four years. Even if it is no longer a physical road, it has left its mark as a story … We simply want to remember it in another way."

Once the week of heat passed, Ge Yulu lost his teaching post at Beijing City University, and the household registration and housing the college had promised him never materialised. "The college has its own difficulties," he said.

Through October and into early November, his days were both lean and unhurried: he spent time back home in Wuhan, attended a forum in Hangzhou, then came to Shanghai for the art fair — panels and exhibitions. Back in his rented room in Yanjiao, he had acquired a television to watch films. His recent favourite was Hibiscus Town (《芙蓉镇》), which gave him pause: "How differently the same work gets treated depending on the era."

II

The moment the morning panel on November 12 ended, Ge Yulu started touring the show. The Shanghai Exhibition Centre was packed, yet the air carried an unhurried quality — people taking photos, chatting, or standing for a long time before a single work. Ge Yulu moved through it like a bullet, spending three to five seconds at each piece, lingering only when something genuinely caught his eye. He covered three halls in under an hour.

He ran into almost no one he knew. As one gallery publicist told QDaily: "He just graduated — he's not really part of the scene yet." Near the exit of the last hall, Yang Xinguang, who was sitting by the door of the "Beijing Commune" booth, stood up to greet him and suggested they head to the West Bund Arts Centre together.

Yang Xinguang is Ge Yulu's senior at CAFA. He signed with a gallery the year he graduated, in 2007, and opened his own studio. Ge Yulu had followed Yang's work before enrolling at CAFA and found it "interesting." Not long before, Yang had been invited to Longli in Guizhou to make a new piece called Eight-Immortals Table — he searched "postmodern, table" on Taobao, then stacked the glass- and marble-topped tables that arrived on a pile of green stone in a village.

"This piece only makes sense in a village," Yang Xinguang explained. "The traditional eight-immortals table was a spectacular design feature of ancient rural life. The current wave of rural revitalisation is essentially a new round of rural spectacle-design. In the first wave, cities called on farmers to come in as cheap labour; in this one, they want to turn farmers into consumers."

Yang is also fond of what Ge Yulu makes, though he can't quite say why — again, "interesting, very conceptual."

Both men had shared on Moments a speech by Gao Shiming, vice president of the China Academy of Art, delivered at the Hangzhou forum. In the address, titled Today Became a Holiday, Gao observed: "Everything that Henri Lefebvre criticised in that 'bureaucratic society of controlled consumption' of the 1950s and 60s in the West is today more acute, more unbearable … Don't forget: we are in Hangzhou, China — the front line of the global internet's daily life, and in Lefebvre's sense, everyday life is the front line."

Ge Yulu and Yang Xinguang pay attention to the "front line," and to "artists who pay attention to the front line." Of everything they saw that day, they lingered longest at Zhou Tao's three video works: Tide, Nanshitou, and Fandong. Nanshitou documents a village-in-the-city in Guangzhou; Fandong shows the dusk after all the earth on a new-town development site has been turned over.

In the taxi, Ge Yulu asked Yang Xinguang how things were going. Yang grumbled that the raw-material markets on Beijing's outskirts had been relocating, driving steel prices up by the day, and that the coal-to-gas policy meant his studio could no longer run the boiler.

III

During his October rest in his hometown of Wuhan, Ge Yulu earned a diving certificate — he wants to retrieve the platform sign from his work Donghu Station, which now lies at the bottom of the lake. Donghu Station is a 2015 piece, and in fact part of the "Donghu Project" launched by Li Juchuan, his undergraduate professor at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts.

Li Juchuan matters to Ge Yulu. The idea behind Ge Yulu had taken shape four years earlier, and had in fact been carried out in public spaces in Wuhan.

In 2012, Ge Yulu was an undergraduate in the new-media arts programme at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, known among classmates by the nickname "Ge Dadan" — roughly, "Ge the Bold." During a short art-history course, the teacher asked students to write their names on the blackboard so she could count how many course books to order. Ge Yulu wrote his name first; everyone else simply added "×2, ×3" after it.

"That made me start thinking about the relationship between a name and a person, and about the kind of interest that arises when a private symbol appears in a public place. Everyone else chose to conceal their names — so what did a name mean to them? If I gave my name no protection at all — treated it as something entirely non-private — what would follow? If my name appeared everywhere in public space, what would that symbol mean?"

He thought of street graffiti, and spray-painted "Ge Yulu" on the wall and ground outside the school gate. This drew attacks from classmates, who even formed an "Anti-Ge Yulu Alliance." "Students who had always been completely indifferent to the public space around them suddenly found common cause, forming an impossibly tight organisation to resist what I was doing." After repeated summons by the school administration and campus security, Ge Yulu spent a whole night painting over everything with cement.

Li Juchuan joined the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts faculty at the end of 2012. Ge Yulu reached out to him on Weibo, and when the name-graffiti came up, Li suggested: "If this symbol could be embedded in the system — hidden in plain sight within public space — that would be more interesting."

Ge Yulu then had the idea of making his name into road signs. He placed a "Ge Yulu" sign in the underground walkway near Fujiabo Road in Wuhan, and hung another outside the Animation School building when he graduated, "making them hard to tell apart from the real thing — a kind of social disorder you could see everywhere in China's rapid urbanisation."

About two years before Ge Yulu tested the early form of Ge Yulu at the gates of the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, Li Juchuan and the artist Li Yu had launched an art project called "Everyone's East Lake".

In late March 2010, the Shenzhen OCT Group acquired 3,167 mu (roughly 2,110 acres) of land in and around the East Lake Scenic Area in Wuhan for 4.3 billion yuan, with plans to build two large theme parks (Happy Valley and Water Park), two upscale housing developments, and two luxury resort hotels. But a Time Weekly journalist, Yao Haiying, found in her reporting that 450 mu of the land earmarked for OCT was actually the shoreline and water surface of East Lake — raising the prospect of the lake being filled in. The article triggered significant public protest against OCT's plans. Although OCT later issued a statement calling the media reports "seriously inaccurate," only positive coverage of the project remained in Wuhan's local press, and residents who visited the site found that land reclamation had already begun.

Li Juchuan and Li Yu decided to "open a space for discussion through art — to give people who cared about the project and East Lake's future a chance to speak and make their views heard." They set up a website and invited participants to create and carry out a piece about East Lake on their own, at the lakeside. From June 25 to August 25, 53 groups registered: artists, architects, designers, punk musicians, musicians, theatre workers, poets, scholars, programmers, and more.

In a 2010 interview with Art Document, Li Juchuan explained: "The way of art is not to solve real problems — it is to make real problems, real conflicts and dilemmas visible. This too is a form of resistance; perhaps it is an even more fundamental one … In our project, it is not art intervening in society. Art here is a way for the individual, as the weaker party, to express an opinion — and to declare their existence."

"Everyone's East Lake" did not stop the Wuhan OCT project, but it kept going. In early 2012, OCT's first sub-project, Happy Valley, officially opened, and the roughly 200 mu of lake area north of Shaojidou, along with part of the East Lake fishery ponds, was quickly filled in. The "Donghu Project" relaunched under the name "Screw Your Happy Valley," with additional organisers including Wu Wei, lead singer of the Bread of Life band, and the punk musician Mai Dian. In July 2014 the Donghu Project ran a third edition, themed "Everyone Makes Public Art," in response to developers using "public art" as a spearhead to grab land.

Now, Li Juchuan would rather not talk about the Donghu Project. "We failed. All these years have passed, and nobody can stop the pace of development. The lake-filling is only one part of it; the bigger problem is the seizure of the lakeshore for villas and luxury communities. There was more filling on the eastern side not long ago — it's under construction now."

Meanwhile, from the first edition to the third, the number of participants fell from 53 to 39. "The core problem is that too few people actually care about these issues. Even many of the participants were just there to make art — they weren't genuinely engaged with the cause."

Yet as recently as August 2016, the "Everyone's East Lake" website was still being updated.

Ge Yulu first appeared on the participants' roster in May 2012, during the project's second edition. He carried out two works outside the Happy Valley fence and on the western shore of Shaojidou: Filling the Valley and My Own 1.1 Metres. For the first, he dug a pond-shaped shallow pit on top of a filled-in fishpond, then smashed up ice blocks made from East Lake water and filled the pit with the shards. For the second, he drank treated East Lake water "and then waited to urinate, using the urine to roughly trace a private shoreline about 1.1 metres long."

He also did a piece called Happy with his then-girlfriend Song Ziwei outside the main gate of Happy Valley — making oversized brush pens out of sponge, dipping them in East Lake water, and inviting Happy Valley visitors to write the character for "happy" together. "The East Lake water evaporated, leaving no trace at the scene."

In 2015, Ge Yulu joined the Donghu Project a second time. He removed a "Donghu" bus-stop sign from a Beijing bus line, transported it to Wuhan, and installed it on the surface of East Lake.

In his statement for Donghu Station, he explained: "One East Lake comes from nature — it sits in my hometown of Wuhan, and there is no single coordinate that can definitively be called East Lake (so there is no Donghu Station either). The other is in Beijing: a clearly marked East Lake (Station), but with no body of water whatsoever. All I did was place a product of urban-development compression back into a natural setting. Feel free to swim out to the sign and wait patiently — who's to say a bus bound for East Lake might not actually arrive."

On September 3, 2016, the "Our Home" youth self-governance laboratory — which had served as the Donghu Project's discussion space — closed because of rent and "various other reasons."

IV

As Li Juchuan remembers it, the best works in the Donghu Project were made by non-artists — Liu Zhenyu, for instance.

Liu Zhenyu is an older schoolmate and acquaintance of Ge Yulu's from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts — also a Wuhan native, same school, different department, where he studied mural painting. He didn't enjoy it much, found it "too traditional." After graduating in 2009, he went to Vancouver for two years, taught himself tattooing on YouTube, spent the better part of a month practising on pigskin, then opened a tattoo shop in Vancouver.

After returning to Wuhan in 2011, Liu Zhenyu opened a tattoo shop in the city called Indiefellas Tattoo. He sat inside and drew on people's bodies at 800 yuan an hour. He also briefly ran a non-profit online gallery called "PHOTOPARK," divided into a Lab section for experimental works and a Style section for visual art. He wanted to see "whether anyone would like a gallery done that way," but the venture ran only a few months before closing — it was, he said, "very incomplete."

Liu Zhenyu describes Li Juchuan, Ge Yulu, and himself as all "pretty daring, pretty fierce" — not the settled type. He's a big fan of Ge Yulu's work because it's "simple, direct, and bold — hits the G-spot."

Liu Zhenyu's contribution to the Donghu Project was called BMX Jump into East Lake. He was already into BMX freestyle, a small-wheel extreme cycling sport, so in July 2010 he gathered BMX enthusiasts from Wuhan's No Parking bike shop to "jump their bikes into the lake" at the Lingbomen stretch of Wuhan University's shoreline.

In his registration email to Li Juchuan, he wrote that Happy Valley would include a regulation skate park — something he and many other riders in Wuhan had long wished for, since the city had none. He then wrote a line that became the event's slogan: "Perhaps our happiness doesn't need Happy Valley."

Li Juchuan considered the event a great success. "They built a temporary launch ramp on the lakeshore. Alongside the BMX riders, many young people who had never tried it before came to have a go … I think this is a perfect example of using imagination to create your own space."

In his email to Li Juchuan, Liu Zhenyu also said that since his voice couldn't change the government's will, he would rather let the piece give him a sense of freedom and joy, and he hoped participants would come away with a clearer sense of what "happiness and freedom" meant. Li Juchuan affirmed this dimension: "It is a form of resistance by individual spatial production against the city's spatial production. In practice, it also briefly disrupted the order of urban space arranged by the power system."

From 2010 through the summer of 2016, BMX Jump into East Lake was held seven years running. In the third year (August 2012), two resident riders from Happy Valley even came to join in, and the event found a sponsor in Wuhan's local Bar 18. By the sixth year (2015), however, Liu Zhenyu fell out with the other organisers. Liu held that the purpose of the lake jump was "to resist the developer's illegal lake-filling for housing," while the others felt it was about environmental protection; that summer there were two separate "lake jumps" — Liu's own, more raw and spontaneous, and another run by the rest, which had become a small music festival complete with a professional DJ, inflatable water trampolines, aerial drone filming, and coverage on Baidu News' front page.

Ge Yulu had long been urging Liu Zhenyu to come to Beijing. After six years in Wuhan, Liu finally took the advice this past summer. First, he and five others — Lü Dian, JUJI, He Chengyun, Gen Tu Haogao, and Ke Qiao — launched a tattoo road trip around China, staging a "tattoo van press conference" at Lingbomen, the famous (and infamous) East Lake jumping spot in Wuhan, with the Wuhan street performer "Dida Di" providing entertainment. Then they set off from Wuhan, passing through Xi'an, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guiyang, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xiamen, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Mengzhou, and finally back to Beijing — "tattooing the body of China's roads" with a customised tattoo van. Vice made a documentary about them, calling them "New-Century Tattoo Warriors."

In October, Liu Zhenyu opened another tattoo shop in Beijing, at the Drum Tower — "Good People Tattoo."

After the Ge Yulu incident, Liu Zhenyu asked Ge Yulu whether he felt like a celebrity. Ge's reply: not at all.

"For an artist, fame is what keeps you alive," Liu Zhenyu said. Tattooing is, for him, a way of balancing art and survival. Asked whether he envied Ge Yulu, he laughed: "Not just yet — his traffic hasn't converted into cash."

V

Ge Yulu never stayed idle.

On November 19, Beijing began its clearance and remediation operations. Ge Yulu arranged to go with a few journalist friends to Xinjianzhuang in Daxing, where the fire had broken out, and to the nearby villages of Niying and Haijiao. From 1:30 in the afternoon to past 8 at night, he barely spoke — just watching, photographing, listening as the reporters talked with villagers and tenants.

The only extended conversation happened in the car. A volunteer from the Picun Workers' Home, who knew Ge Yulu was in the group, asked whether he had work, what pieces he was making, whether he worried about income. Ge answered each in turn: "No." "Working on something." "Worried, yes — making art still means you have to think about how to stay alive."

In his four years in Beijing, Ge Yulu had moved three times. The first was a demolition in Feijiacun Village, an artists' community in Cuigezhuang township, Chaoyang. The next two were in Shunyi, and both times the reason was "eviction over fire-safety issues." After the third move, Ge Yulu simply decamped to Yanjiao — an 80-square-metre two-bedroom flat for 1,600 yuan a month, cheap and unlikely to be disturbed. Because Yanjiao is more than 30 kilometres from the city, he developed a habit: he falls asleep the moment he boards public transport.

"Sometimes at night I'd stand on Ge Yulu Road, looking at the lit windows, imagining that one of them might be mine. Someone joked that in Beijing it doesn't matter whether you own a flat — what matters is having a road with your name on it. I hadn't even rented a flat; I certainly couldn't afford to rent near Ge Yulu Road — too expensive. I was sleeping on the floor in a classmate's rented place, no air conditioning, incredibly hot — though that kind of heat is also a feature of our Wuhan, so I treated it as something that brought back childhood, and stopped feeling sorry for myself. What I want the work to convey is also this: to use imagination to look at your own life anew," Ge Yulu said in the Renwu interview.

On November 23, a large apartment block to the left of the Xinjianzhuang gate had yet to be demolished. Ge Yulu had already explored the area during the day; that night he led a few journalist companions back to examine its interior and the traces left behind by tenants.

The building was a labyrinthine tangle grown from years of incremental additions. Its walls were plastered with red and yellow flyers for small loans and paid blood donation; narrow corridors opened onto rows of twenty-square-metre rooms, each in disarray — rolled-up quilts, half-empty instant-noodle boxes, knocked-over cups, a print of a passage from the Lanting Preface hanging askew. Every room had a window, but none could ventilate, because new structures had been built flush against the outside. In the square communal areas, dust-coated laundry hung overhead; stairs on both sides led down or up into the next layer of space. Some of those next layers were guesthouses, others apartments — nested inside each other like Russian dolls. Walk all the way to the innermost ring, and through broken glass you could see the Jufuyuan apartment building that had caught fire on the 18th.

Ge Yulu was moved by these organically evolved forms. He explained that when he first came to Beijing, he had lived in exactly this kind of place.

In early December, he went to Shenzhen to look at the urban villages. The 7th Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture was under way there; some villagers' homes had been converted into art spaces for artists to exhibit. A villager showed Ge Yulu a notice bearing an official seal, its wording nearly identical to notices posted all over Xinjianzhuang in Daxing: "Please vacate by XX date."

Li Juchuan also took part in the Fourth Public Sculpture Exhibition, "Shared Domain," held concurrently in Shenzhen. He submitted two proposals; one — to set up temporary shelters for the homeless in Shenzhen Central Park — was rejected. But the other, a billboard work titled Good Morning, Shenzhen!, did appear. He erected slogans common to factory districts inside the park, so "people coming here to exercise and relax might think about others in this city — those who may have just finished a night shift, just walked out of the factory gate."

On December 14, Ge Yulu appeared at a solo exhibition by Yin Xiuzhen at Pace Gallery in 798.

Yin Xiuzhen is the wife of Song Dong, Ge Yulu's thesis supervisor at CAFA. The press has described this artistic couple as the most archetypal of kindred spirits: "Classmates who saw exhibitions together, who were both 'stirred' by the currents of Western modernism, and who in 1994 each gave up painting to move into performance, video, and installation."

Song Dong is known for "directly appropriating everyday objects into his art practice, making works small and fine to the point of returning to plain life" — pieces like Breathing (lying face-down on Tiananmen Square in winter and on the frozen surface of Houhai Lake, exhaling for forty minutes) and Waste Not (co-curating with his mother a display of all the household items she had accumulated and kept). Yin Xiuzhen specialises in "combining intimately personal objects with public spaces" — for example, Slow Release, in which she collected second-hand garments totalling more than 200 square metres from locals in Moscow and hand-sewed them into a hollow capsule 4.5 metres in diameter and 12 metres long.

Song Dong met considerable resistance when he turned away from painting. In 1994, he used 10,000 yuan from selling a painting to stage his first solo show, Another Lesson: Do You Want to Play with Me? — covering the floor with tens of thousands of exam papers from his school years, and inviting visitors to read the "wordless books." The show was shut down thirty minutes after opening, for being "not serious and not compliant with fire regulations."

Song Dong declined to comment on the "Ge Yulu incident." His reply to QDaily was: "Thank you for your concern for him. I hope you will also pay more attention to his work."

We spoke with Ge Yulu about the relationship between art and social reality. Ge brought up British artist Tim Knowles' Tree Drawings — tying pencils to branches and letting them move with the breeze to draw. "This is too interesting, and at the same time completely uninteresting. Interesting, because even something so minute can become a decent work; uninteresting, because the range of material is so limited."

He felt that, compared with his peers, his own work does engage with social questions more directly. "Some of my peers don't like bringing too much of the social into art — they see it as old-fashioned, not pure enough. But I think a kind of purity in art may be another form of obsession, another form of limitation. Art reflects its era — the times you live in shape the work you make."

When the graduation show went up in May, Ge Yulu joked to his supervisor Song Dong that he'd "wasted his time in the master's programme" — three years at CAFA, and the work he'd made was still an idea that had begun taking shape at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts. "My supervisor Song Dong found this very funny. He said, 'Then I just wasted my time teaching him' — ha! In the end I did it all for nothing too."

"For nothing" (bai zuo) may not be such a bad thing. In 2012, Song Dong was invited to documenta in Kassel. He had garbage from the city of Kassel hauled to the centre of Karlsaue Park, covered it with soil, planted vegetation on top, and built a 6-metre-high artificial hill — naming it Doing Nothing Garden (《白做园》). Neon tubes on the hill flashed fifteen characters: "If you do nothing, it's wasted; if you do it, it's also wasted; but even though it's wasted, you still have to do it."

In the exhibition text he wrote for Ge Yulu's graduate show, Ge Yulu on Ge Yulu Road, Song Dong wrote: "Ge Yulu has graduated and continues to walk down Ge Yulu Road. Ge Yulu Road is a golden avenue, and it may also be a thorny path. He must both walk on Ge Yulu Road and escape from it."