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Cole Lu

@colelu

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on view: knowledge is myth @carpenter_center_harvard
inquiries: @herald_st london | bologna

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Knowledge Is Myth: Chimeric Continuities opened last week at @carpenter_center_harvard and is on view through December 13

The installation in the first image brings together independently titled works made between 2018 and 2026, alongside reworked elements, in a new display under the umbrella title:

Here lies all his love of life. For what gives value to travel is fear: deprived of our mask, completely surface. Soul-sick, miraculously, the whole of life. The whole of lie.
(Second Manifesto)
2026
Burnt linen, bronze, marble, cherry, facsimile case

Also pictured is Orthros, 2019, and a few moments from last week’s artist talk.

Thank you Danni @danni_sh and Kate @katemcn , it’s been such a pleasure working with you both. I’m so grateful. It was a mesmerizing fever dream to share the conversation with Ami, @aydo_studio , and Danni last week. Thank you to the Carpenter Center team and everyone who joined us for the opening and talk.

Organized by Danni Shen, with Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, Candice Lin, AYDO (Ayoung Yu & Nicholas Oh), and Cole Lu

2 & 4: Danni Shen
7–8: Courtesy the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Photo: Susan Young taken in Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University by @colelu

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7 days ago

I’m honored to share that The Engineers (2024) has entered the permanent collection of Dib Bangkok.

First presented at Wat Bowon, a royal temple and home to the first Buddhist educational institution in Thailand, for the Bangkok Art Biennale, the work was developed between the temple and Bangkok Kunsthalle, located in the former Watana Panich printing house, a site that was damaged by fire and now operates as Bangkok Kunsthalle.

Across these sites, the installation considers how inscription, destruction, and reconstruction are embedded within the architecture it occupies, and how systems of knowledge, memory, and collection are shaped through them across histories, in forms that continue to be renewed.

Grateful to have this work in the collection of Dib Bangkok, presented with Nova Contemporary.

@dibbangkok @bkkartbiennale @bangkok_kunsthalle @novacontemporary taken in Bangkok by @colelu

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6 months ago

Home is a maze when no one agrees on time.
(Stoicheion)
2024
Burnt linen, pine, hard rolled steel
243 x 140 x 81 in (617.2 x 355.6 x 205.7 cm)

Stoicheion at @icaatmeca (522 Congress Street, Portland, Maine 04101) will continue through September 15, 2024

To examine established social hierarchies and their myth-making origins. Stoicheion suggests the site of an archeological dig featuring cast concrete reliefs and an excavation sheltering system covered by linen.
“Stoicheion,” the Greek title of Euclid’s Elements and Aristoxenus’s Elements of Harmonics, has held various meanings, including “the length of the shadow of a sundial,” “the stars or astral bodies as elements of fire,” or more commonly “the smallest parts of anything which stand in relation to one another.”
Imagery is burnt into the fabric, incised into concrete, and charred into the wood to recompose the beginning of beginnings through these fragments and “relics.” Moving through material, language, and various mark-making gestures to tell the story of a new possible foundation of “humanity.”

Photo by Joel Tsui, courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design taken in Portland, Maine by @colelu

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2 years ago

On view at Frieze London with Herald St
Booth A27
from 14—18, October

As he thinks and moves past saplings, he becomes something different, unable to form words around memories or the people he loved. Here is a stash of promise, the power of expression, or power as expressed, like Redwoods, like lived experience, like a tree needs no witness, like the dying sea. Not being ready, meaning movement hurts, has to do with presence, consumed by flames. Of all things, he wonders about the trivial, the otherness of others, as in how to be a person, how to withhold your apology at the crossing, as in cruelty as universal, as apple pie, as America, proud to serve to die, of all things, matters of heart and mind.
(Amnesia)
2025-2026
Burnt birch
61 x 45.7 x 3.8 cm / 24 x 18 x 1.5 in

© Cole Lu. Courtesy of the artist and Herald St, London & Bologna. Photo by Frankie Tyska.

@friezeofficial
@herald_st taken in Frieze Regents Park by @colelu

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21 hours ago

#ColeLu features in ‘Knowledge Is Myth: Chimeric Continuities’ which previews this Thursday at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (@carpenter_center_harvard).

The exhibition features works by four artists and collectives that complicate the binaries of mythology and knowledge, and their constructs. The title ‘Knowledge Is Myth’ plays off the phrase “knowledge is power,” popularised by Sir Francis Bacon in the late sixteenth century at the height of the European Enlightenment, globalisation, and religious conflict. Drawing from diasporic as well as chimeric and hybrid subjectivities, these works reconfigure colonial hierarchies of being that separate human and nonhuman realms, while embracing what decolonial writers Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh describe as an ecology of knowledge informed by non-Western epistemologies, carried through myths and the power of storytelling.

Lu combines pyrography (drawing by fire), mythological storytelling, and autobiographical narrative to examine trans identity and longing. Lu examines established social hierarchies and their myth-making origins, such as Western folklore, where monsters are misunderstood, feared, and eternally othered from humans. In a new site-specific installation, the artist reimagines what it means to become monstrous, or more-than-human, throughout time as well as modes of display.

The exhibition continues until 13 December 2026.

#ColeLu
Thoroughbred (But you, you were born for a lucent day.)
2018–26
Installation comprising existing work and found furniture
Bronze; found carved cherry side table with black marble top
26.5 x 25.5 x 16.5 in / 67.31 x 64.77 x 41.91 cm taken in Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University by @colelu

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15 days ago

Somewhere in the middle of crime and Love Me Tender, 2026
in collaboration with @pitifulmimosa
Site-responsive installation with architectural interventions and erasure texts

made for the inaugural gathering of lovers
@dionysus.in.modernity @lilykwak @cyntheticpleasures
on view by appointment through September 9 by @colelu

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2 months ago

Looking back at Open Video Call 2018, artist Cole Lu ( @colelu ) reflects on his selected work, "Everytime I Said Something to You Deeply and Untechnical", a work he says feels like "encountering a past version of myself through a language I hadn't spoken in a long time."⁠
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Though Cole's practice has since evolved toward sculptural work, he doesn't see his early film work as a departure, but the beginning of a reworking. Cole considers the writing that first emerged as text within the film gradually became a way of thinking, that now shapes his sculptures, titles, and larger bodies of work. ⁠
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Almost 9 years later, the film captures a quiet moment of transition: an artist standing on the threshold of something new, carrying forward ideas that were already taking root.⁠
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As we count down to the final days of Open Video Call 2026, we're grateful to celebrate the artists and artistic practices that emerged over the years.⁠
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Where might your work lead?⁠
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🎥 Submit your video to ICA OVC by Friday, July 31 at 11:59 PM. ⁠Click the link in bio.⁠
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Image Credits:⁠
Slide 1: Cole Lu. Photo by Farah Al Qasimi ( @frequentlyaskedquestion )⁠
Slides 2 - 6: Stills from "Everytime I Said Something To You Deeply and Untechnical" (2017) directed by Cole Lu. ⁠ by @colelu

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2 months ago

CFG-20260717
Look 35 Cole Lu @colelu
Our dad Cole Lu pulls up in the cargo van, with snacks in hand and small unexpected presents to make each day on earth together a gift.

Vision: @cfgny2
Lookbook Photography: @davidbrandongeeting
Styling: @avenagallagher
Styling Coordinator: @willum.iv
Hair: @Kazukatahira
Makeup: @souhi_lee @milkmakeup
Nails: @c_ielle
Shoes: @marsell.official
Eyewear: @mykitaofficial @akila.la
Jewelry: @lauralombardi @hera_jwlry @hannahjewett._ @jwoo___________
Sound: @l_y_d_o
Lighting: @s.arai__
Movement: @elliot_reed_laboratories
Dramaturg/PR: @cyntheticpleasures
Amant PR: @nothingobstacle
Kitchen PR: @purplepr
Stage Management: @buffysierra
Production: @amant.arts @thekitchen_nyc
Catering: @h31.syk @bong.nyc @puredegrees taken in Amant by @colelu

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3 months ago

A few moments from Uses of Pressure, a reading with Miriam Stoney at the closing of Fire Lips, curated by Johanna Thorell at the University Gallery of the Angewandte, Vienna.

The exhibition brought together works by Anne Carson, VALIE EXPORT, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, Cole Lu, Ana Mendieta, mhm,mhm, Evelyn Plaschg, Miriam Stoney, and Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor.

Thank you to Johanna, Miriam, and everyone who joined us.🤍

@university_gallery_angewandte
@dieangewandte taken in Die Angewandte by @colelu

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4 months ago

This Friday I’ll be reading in Vienna with Miriam Stoney for the closing of Fire Lips, curated by Johanna Thorell.

The reading brings together texts written across different years, alongside and around the works in the exhibition.

Some of these texts have lived for years. Others arrived much more recently.

Fri, 5 June 2026, 6 pm

Uses of pressure: A reading with contributions by Cole Lu and Miriam Stoney

University Gallery of the Angewandte, Sala Terrena
Heiligenkreuzerhof, Staircase 7, Lower Ground Floor
1010 Vienna

@university_gallery_angewandte
@dieangewandte taken in Die Angewandte by @colelu

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4 months ago

Fire Lips, on view at Universitätsgalerie der Angewandten, Vienna, through June 6, 2026

So grateful to be included in this exhibition with Anne Carson, VALIE EXPORT, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, Ana Mendieta, mhm,mhm, Evelyn Plaschg, Miriam Stoney, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor. Curated by Johanna Thorell.

Installation view, Universitätsgalerie der Angewandten, Vienna, 2026

The woods had grown so still he could only hear something inside himself quietly pounding. Since returning, he sees Time everywhere—in the eye of a needle, the dust on the windowsill, the red at sunset. In the red sunset, he opened his eye; the hours jumped out of the clock, stood before him, demanding he work correctly. (Hypnos), 2023
Burnt birch
16 x 20 x 1.5 in/ 40.6 x 50.8 x 3.8 cm

Courtesy of Y.D.C.
Photo by Manuel Carreon Lopez

@dieangewandte
@university_gallery_angewandte taken in Die Angewandte by @colelu

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5 months ago

When it comes to memory. About his place in the world. The rules of the game have held for decades now: gravity, electricity. He wishes he had known that traveling lived inside so many conditionals. Like politics and poetry. Like love and stimulus. Like taut and ready.

That afternoon at the red sunset, when he said “ready,” what he meant was “willing.”

(Hypnos)
2026
Burnt cherry, red oak
36 x 8 x 8 cm / 14.1 x 3.1 x 3.1 in by @colelu

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5 months ago