Tuesday Night Lecture Series: Cole Lu

As part of the Tuesday Night MFA Lecture Series, BU College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts presents a lecture with artist Cole Lu.

Combining literary and historical references with autobiographical experiences, Cole Lu’s practice builds new mythologies that carry echoes of trauma, transformation, and regeneration. Lu questions the theistic concept of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothingness), proposing a more complicated interspersal of time and human existence.

Incorporating classical approaches and often surprising usages of distinctive materials, Lu creates portraiture with engraving and pyrography techniques; he writes with fire, scorching the portrait into a mural of historical fiction (mythical retelling) and historical facts (historical artifact). His writing/ burning is a portal of material and linguistic transition. His further use of poetry is visual as well as formal. Lu (re)invents, (re)names, and (re)writes his subjects, composing each work with an elaborate fragmented title—a literary device that further subverts conventional linear narratives and amplifies his poetic vision.

Presented as a compilation of gestures or a collection of brief anecdotes, Lu’s work unfolds serially, following invented characters through a parallel world of his creation. Each exhibition or body of work reveals another element, broadening his narrative to incorporate new sites and characters. Each work is a continuation of a belief system generating the renderings of an inner transformation through invoking mythologies that are both alien and familiar.

Cole Lu (b. Taipei, Taiwan) lives and works in New York, NY. His work has been exhibited at Chapter NY; New York; Company Gallery; New York; The Drawing Center, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, among others. His writing has appeared in Coffee House Press, Minneapolis; WONDER, New York; and The Seventh Wave, New York. His publication Smells Like Content (Endless Editions, 2015) is in the artists’ book collection of the Museum of Modern Art Library, New York.

This is a free and in-person event available to the BU Community.

Hosted by the graduate programs in painting and sculpture at Boston University, the Tuesday Night MFA Lecture series brings practicing artists to campus to present their work throughout the semester.

BU College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts prepares students to think seriously, to see critically, to make intensely, and to act with creative agency in the contemporary world. The School of Visual Arts merges the intensive studio education of an art school with the opportunities of a large urban university, and is committed to educating the eye, hand, and mind of the artist.