Lynn Lu

Lynn Lu’s performance art contains multitudes. Constantly exploring new terrain, her art spans continents and classifications. Multilingual and multinational, Lu spent her years of study immersing herself in different cultures and languages. Amidst the sparkling diversity of her works, a recurring fascination with water stands out. Lu’s performances and installations have engaged with water in all its states and forms, repeatedly, yet in widely varying configurations. From bathtubs to shark-invested oceans, her frequent partnerships with the aquatic have explored an astonishing variety of themes, ranging from the global to the maternal.

She has remained floating face down for hours on end, stood on her head naked in the snow, invited visitors to slurp her bathwater while she bathed in an art gallery in San Francisco, sank herself in a sinking boat, wrapped her head in ice, and flooded a building’s upper floor. Constantly playing with scale and size, some of her works experiment with the traces left by water’s evaporation and its ungraspable ephemerality while others emphasize water’s overwhelming excesses. Questions of temporality are also often featured as blocks of ice melt with painstaking slowness or sizzle away in mere seconds on hot pavement. Amnionic fluid, blood, and breastmilk also stage repeat appearances in her performances, foregrounding the deeply fraught relation between women and water.     – A. Street