MFA Lecture Series: Cole Lu

Artist Cole Lu will deliver a talk titled The Slumberer’s Tales as part of the MFA Lecture Series. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Lu (b. 1984, Taipei, Taiwan) is an artist and writer based in New York. Lu’s work is an active engagement of shifting and reframing the value and worth of what is subject to Others in colonial history, with (re)invention, (re)naming, and (re)writing as gestures of critiquing the logic of “creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothingness),” which is often justified by the creation myth to erase physically and discursively the preexistence of people, cultures, and languages to a zero degree “nihil.”

Through rewriting classical mythology and allegorical science fiction, Lu’s work speaks against proper objects and coercive mimesis. This act of rewriting primarily results in sculptures, material translations, and their titles. These materials often are wood, silicone, fiberglass, resin, metal, poetry, concrete, and various mediums used in the process, from oil clay to rubber molds to solidified objects.

Each body of work is developed from anecdotal evidence to question the capacity of historical realism, and is part of a lifelong series of artist’s “real fiction” on contemporary values and belief systems.

Lu’s work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), and so on. His writing has appeared in Coffee House Press (Minneapolis), WONDER (New York), and The Seventh Wave (New York). Lu’s publication Smells Like Content (Endless Editions, 2015) is in the artists’ book collection of the MoMA Library, New York.