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We deck our halls with it and dye our linens. But should it come creeping up the cobbles, we scrub it out, fast as we can. When it blooms beneath our skin, we bleed it out. And when we, together all, find that our reach has exceeded our grasp, we cut it down, we stamp it out, we spread ourselves atop it and smother it beneath our bellies, but it comes back. It does not dally, nor does it wait to plot or conspire. Pull it out by the roots one day and then next, there it is, creeping in around the edges. Whilst we're off looking for red, in comes green. Red is the color of lust, but green is what lust leaves behind, in heart, in womb. Green is what is left when ardor fades, when passion dies, when we die, too. When you go, your footprints will fill with grass. Moss shall cover your tombstone, and as the sun rises, green shall spread over all, in all its shades and hues. This verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements and, try as you might, all you hold dear will succumb to it. Your skin, your bones. Your virtue.
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Since discovering the term ‘tender perennials’ while in residence at Wave Hill in the Bronx, Weihui Lu has turned her attention towards systems of care & their eventual collapse and repair; quantitative time vs a state of enchantment; grid-maps vs land that continues to hold its own shape despite the imposition of human intention; and structural dovetails conjured in glass and steel between two seemingly oppositional yet enmeshed frameworks.
Artist:
“Using the conceptual framework of traditional Chinese landscape painting in a contemporary context, my work explores ancestral memory, image reproduction and degradation, and the land itself as alive and prescient.
My first encounters with land were from a lineage of imaged landscapes — and the realization that these images formed the grounds of selfhood for me as much as the concrete sidewalks of the city I grew up in, has long driven my work. The sense of disconnect and friction between the built environment, and the ghosts of the land as it was / is underneath, continue to haunt me. Equally, the contrast of my surroundings and the echoes of a landscape I carry within is an ever-discordant hum.
Through this hunger to know a place I have built a nomadic practice. Landscape becomes a language, and language becomes a site; both are privy to the same fallacies of slippage, displacement, and extraction. In the forests of upstate New York, clear-cut four hundred years ago, I weave a gauze-like fabric through copses of trees; I walk barefoot on the red desert sand and rocks of New Mexico, where vestiges of both internment camps and indigenous life have been vanished from sight. I am more interested in an empathetic form of communication and knowing than an analytical one: a body positioned to feel, land as a repository of grief.
I dream of an earth beyond mapping.
Aside from matter found at the site as a means of knowing the place, I am drawn to materials that wear their age. Through labor-intensive processes that imbue them with a sort of haptic-time, I grow ephemeral installations and interventions that are allowed to decay. The inherent fragility – of handmade paper, or gauze, or topographies drawn with sand – requests both shared vulnerability and care. I am searching for a devotional relationship to making objects, and my reconciliation with their disappearance.”
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Weihui Lu was born in Shanghai, China, and grew up in Queens, New York. As a site-responsive installation artist, she is interested in exploring the psychological implications of the modern landscape, as well as narrative, place-making and diasporic experience.
Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, Field Projects, and Tutu Gallery, among others, and featured in Hyperallergic, Time Out New York, and Sine Theta Magazine. Lu has attended residencies at Wave Hill Winter Workspace, Marble House Project, Santa Fe Art Institute, ChaNorth and Byrdcliffe Arts Colony. In addition to her studio practice, Lu co-curates the experimental project space Bob’s Gallery, which has moved beyond its physical location in Bushwick (2021-2024) to a migratory pop-up model. Lu holds a B.A. in English Literature from Barnard College, Columbia University, and is a M.F.A. candidate in Sculpture at Bard College.
TEMPEST
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