Yuming Lu

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Yuming Lu


Yuming Lu was born in 1997 in Shandong, China, and currently lives and works in London, UK. He moved to London in 2023 and completed an MA in Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins in 2025.

Lu works across sculpture, installation, photography and moving image. Drawing from his experience as a gay Chinese migrant navigating London’s gay community, his practice examines the contradictions within these spaces, where sexual freedom and accessibility coexist with objectification, racialised desirability, body pressure, emotional distance, hookup culture, non-traditional relationship structures, sexual experimentation, sex-party culture and pervasive inequalities of power. Instead of merely describing these conditions, he gives them emotional and material form, considering how intimacy, aspiration and identity are organised within hierarchies shaped by race, physique and access.

Salvaged car components are used throughout Lu’s recent sculptures as metaphors for the body and its relationship to desire. His association between cars and Western gay pornography is rooted in growing up during China’s post-reform and opening-up era, when European cars represented aspirational material success and an imagined Western modernity, while Western pornography shaped and restricted his early understanding of sex, masculinity and desirability. By integrating these two visual languages, Lu creates objects that appear seductive, polished, masculine and defensive, yet remain damaged. Through this tension, vulnerability is sharpened, while eroticism becomes intertwined with sadness. These industrial objects allow Lu to consider how bodies become surfaces of projection, fantasy, status and control.

Lu investigates how desire is produced through repetition, display and circulation. His work considers how whiteness operates as the unmarked sexual default within gay visual culture, while global-majority bodies are made legible through racialised signs, stereotypes, sexual roles and exoticism. Such bodies may be hypersexualised or desexualised but are rarely depicted to appear as whole and complex subjects.

His practice asks how structures of desire determine who holds power, who submits, who is permitted to be seen as a whole subject, and who becomes legible only by being placed within someone else’s fantasy and pressured to perform that position as an identity.

Lu also works as a fashion video director, commercial director and video editor.