Location: Richmond, CA / Boston, MA
Medium: Sculpture, installation
Website: cathyclu.com
Cathy Lu (she/they) was born in Miami, Florida, to Taiwanese immigrant parents, and lives and works between Richmond, California and Boston, Massachusetts. She received a BA in Chinese language, history, and culture and a BFA in ceramics from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, followed by an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She currently teaches ceramics at SMFA at Tufts University and was a longtime teacher at California College of the Arts and Mills College. She is a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award winner and a 2019 Asian Cultural Council / Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation Fellow.
Her residencies include EKWC European Ceramics Work Centre in the Netherlands (2026), a Harvard Ceramics Artist-in-Residence (2023–24), Kohler Arts/Industry Residency in Wisconsin (2023), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2022), Archie Bray Foundation (2021), Anderson Ranch Arts Center (2016), Recology San Francisco (2017), and the Kala Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the US Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia, Galerie du Monde in Hong Kong, and Prospect 6: The New Orleans Triennial.
Lu works in ceramic sculpture and installation to explore Asian American identity and the ways that immigration, cultural hybridity, and assimilation become part of — and are shaped by — American identity. She manipulates traditional Chinese art imagery, objects, and presentation — decorative vases, incense holders, vessels, and mythological figures — to deconstruct assumptions about what is “authentically” Asian and what it means to belong to two cultures without being fully accepted by either. Ceramics as a material is itself a contradiction — hard and fragile, ancient and contemporary — that mirrors the contradictions of being Asian American: simultaneously invisible and hypervisible, foreign and familiar. A recurring motif is the peach, a symbol of longevity and good fortune in Chinese culture, which Lu recasts in new contexts — as cast fruit from Chinatown markets, as ceramic garden myths — to examine how cultural meaning shifts in diaspora. Her most recent work reimagines creation myths such as the Garden of Eden and the Immortal Peach Garden as a way to explore the United States as both utopian and dystopian space for historically excluded communities.
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