Smiling on the newly finished work, A Day of Light in Exile, at Franconia Sculpture Park, MN, 2012
Lu Xu
Lu Xu is an artist and curator based in Guizhou, China and Greensboro, NC, USA. She is originally from Guiyang, China. As an emerging artist, Lu has exhibited at Tapir Gallery, Berlin, Southfirst Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, NC, Elsewhere Museum, NC, and was a fellow artist at Franconia Sculpture Park, MN, in 2016 and Salem2Salem at Bodenseekreis, Salem, Germany and Salem Art Works, NY, in 2018-19. Lu Xu worked as the Curator of Gatewood Gallery and Director of Art Truck at School of Art, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro from 2015-17.
Through performative and participatory works, Lu situates herself in everyday life scenes, unfamiliar geographic locations, or in interactions with other people. Her works challenge the standard language and efficiencies in the mundane by being physically tiring, time consuming, absurd, obscure, unpredictable, and impractical, such as such as walking 72 miles in the suburbs in the San Francisco Bay area, dragging a five-foot long boat for 2.5 miles for a routine grocery shopping trip, incorporating origami to tell two coincidental stories in a circular subway line in Beijing, or asking people to assign me 15-second tasks through an online portal. She uses her body in neutral and low-key means as tools to reveal alternative, unfamiliar possibilities. She puts herself under challenging conditions in the context of the mundane in order explore unproductivity’s richness, aliveness, and poetry.