My practice grasps at an ever-shifting understanding of site, relation, and the ethics of impermanence.

My first encounters with nature were from a lineage of imaged landscapes. Over time, I’ve come to realize how these formed the grounds of selfhood for me, much as the concrete sidewalks of the city I grew up in. The sense of disconnect between the built environment, and the echoes of the land as it was, continue to haunt me. The contrast of my surroundings and the landscape I carry within is an ever-discordant hum.

I have built a nomadic practice out of a hunger to know a place. In the forests of upstate New York, clear-cut four hundred years ago, I wove gauze-like fabric through copses of trees; in the desert of New Mexico, where vestiges of internment camps and indigenous life were vanished from sight, I walked barefoot on the red rocks and sand.

I desire an empathetic form of communication and knowing: a body positioned to feel, land as a repository of grief.

I dream of an earth beyond mapping.

Aside from the ritualistic practice of finding materials as a means of knowing, I am drawn to materials that wear their age. Through labor-intensive processes that imbue them with a haptic-time, I grow ephemeral installations and interventions that are allowed to move and 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, and my reconciliation with their disappearance.

Bio

Weihui Lu is a multidisciplinary artist based in Queens, New York. Through ephemeral, site-specific activations, her practice explores relationality, the ecological history and projected futures of places, and the psychological implications of the modern landscape.

Her installations have been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Wave Hill, Tempest Gallery, The Steinberg Museum of Art, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, among others. She has attended residencies at Marble House Project, Santa Fe Art Institute, Wave Hill Winter Workspace, and I-Park Foundation, and received grants from the Queens Council on the Arts, NYFA and the Milton and Sally Arts Foundation. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Art Spiel, and Li Tang. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from Barnard College, and is an M.F.A. candidate in Sculpture at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.