A participant in SomoS’ Artist-in-Residence program, Ming Lu is a multidisciplinary artist educated in London and currently living in Berlin. She uses techniques such as photography, sculpture, installation and performance to examine gender stereotypes and culture’s expectations of women.

Lu’s work metaphorically references everyday objects such as cosmetics, or stiletto shoes, that are associated with idealized or glamorized feminine identities.

Applying a kind of aesthetic travesty, her pieces often appropriate and initially seem to inhabit the consumerist aesthetics whose influence she critiques. Pervasive pop-cultural symbols of femininity, female rituals and objectification are subverted by Ming Lu by placing them in absurdist, surreal and poetic narratives and settings.

Ming Lu obtained an MA Photography from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2018; and a BA Photography from the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London in 2016.

Group exhibitions Lu took part in include Acropolis, VR Days Europe, Amsterdam, 2017; Acropolis, Royal College of Art, London, 2017; Offprint, Tate Modern, London, 2017; WIP – Work in Progress, Royal College of Art, London, 2017; 90 degrees, London College of Communication, London, 2016; Night Visions, Museum of London, 2018.

Ming Lu took part in the Start Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2018; and The Other Art Fair, Bristol, 2018. Staying in Berlin after her SomoS residency, Lu staged several participative art projects and was awarded the BBA Artist Prize.

In 2018, Aesthetica Magazine published an interview with Ming Lu, in which she stated

My recent work has to do with how I feel about being a women, or more precisely, what I fear of being a women. However, I notice that because of my self-awareness, I use my personal feelings as an initial start for my work, and I search the outside world and histories for inspirations and references that connect to my feelings and experience, and I take them in.

 

Ming Lu’s three-month artist residency at SomoS culminated in the solo exhibition Pussy, presented at SomoS art space December 2018.

---

Ming Lu homepage