LUAP - Meet the artist

The Pink Bear has been featured in different formats around the globe and is now a signature of LUAP’s work.

But why the bear?

Find out during this intimate talk with the artist himself, in the surroundings of his hand-painted collection of huge canvases. This is a very rare showing of the pieces all together in one place.

It has appeared in Street Art murals in London, even as soft-toy collectibles worldwide, on a billboard in Times Square, on the front cover of an Italian fashion magazine, in photographs, prints, and live performances.

And this Autumn, in the year of the artist’s 40th birthday, the Bear will be making its most complex and physically-demanding trip yet.

In September, Robinson is travelling to Mongolia to ride for 10 days on horseback through one of the world’s most remote landscapes in order to create new photographic artworks of The Pink Bear. The journey will be incredibly physically demanding. The artist has already given up alcohol (and will have done for 120 days before arrival) and begun horse-riding lessons in order to prepare for this challenge. This is an entirely new skill to him and particularly challenging given a life-long fear of horses. The British survival expert Megan Hine (consultant to Bear Grylls) will be accompanying LUAP, along with 20KG of artistic kit which will be carried by the artist each day as they make their way through Mongolia. Each day will require 8 hours on horseback, with up to 12 hours of hiking on summit day. LUAP will be experiencing the nomadic lifestyle lived by Mongolian locals for generations, eating fatty, offal-heavy meat dishes cooked on an open fire and sleeping in below zero conditions. He is now the proud owner of a sleeping bag designed to compensate for minus 15 degrees!

The nomadic way of life is slowly dying out in Mongolia, as successive generations are drawn to life in the large cities. As the ancient traditions fade away and a life lived sustainably from the land is replaced by the instant-gratification of globalised attitudes, it is more important than ever to shine a light on the traditional. The final objective of the mission is to photograph The Pink Bear on horseback with the Golden Eagles of the isolated landscape of the Altai region. A key focus of LUAP’s practise is the impact on the planet of Western attitudes to consumption. This year the artist is collaborating with Le Good Society in a stand against plastic pollution. The decision to ride on horseback was made because the journey will have no carbon footprint other than the feeding of the horses. With the changing employment ecosystem worldwide, the hunters of the Golden Eagles may soon be relegated to legend, and the traditional way of living in Mongolia may vanish too. Now is the time for LUAP to capture the precarious identity of Mongolia, before global warming and westernisation change the country irreparably. This expedition is a call for our collective return to care for the Earth.

Going back to the start... In 2015, LUAP was hit by an epiphany which would guide his life and his artistic practice: adventure is a necessity. During an earlier period of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, the artist had turned to a long-forgotten childhood memory for comfort: a family photograph of LUAP with his parents, brother, and a large pink bear. The photograph now hangs in Robinson’s home while The Pink Bear has evolved into the protagonist of LUAPs multimedia practice. The Pink Bear symbolises both the artist’s childhood hopes and his adult dilemmas.

Find out how the trip to Mongolia went, and hear about the experience of traveling bare horseback in minus temperatures. Has LUAP had any further epiphanies? All this and more on 5 October at The Exhibitionist Hotel.

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