Yuming Lu

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01 Sculptures & Installations


want a piece of me(USED) (2026)

Used automotive components from various vehicles, car key, 3D-printed keychain, photo keychain, photograph
135 cm x 375 cm x 80 cm

This sculpture is assembled from used car components taken from different brands, models and functions. They are forced to become one body, but it doesn’t read as a car: nothing fits properly, nothing works. The failed assembly becomes a structure for thinking about the racialised queer body.
Within the visual economy of desire in gay sexual culture, already shaped by racial hierarchy, whiteness is treated as the sexual default: It is considered desirable, prioritised, individualised and centred. The white body does not need to be a ‘type’ because it is the obvious choice or the standard. This hierarchy is trained into us through porn, apps, images, scene hierarchies and repeated sexual language. By contrast, global-majority bodies are often made visible through racialised signs: skin, face, body shape, sexual role, stereotypes and exoticism. They are either hypersexualised or desexualised, but rarely allowed to appear as a whole, or complex subject.
Under this structure, as an Asian queer person living in London, I became aware that desire directed at me operates inside a man-made structure: Global-majority bodies are not simply desired, they’re broken down into usable fragments. A body becomes a category; a sexual position becomes an identity; desire does not meet me as a whole person.




Alltrade(sprobuilding)andma(i)n(tenance) (2026)
Volkswagen Transporter sliding door, commercial vinyl lettering (partially removed)
150 × 120 × 15 cm


Yuming Lu repurposes a salvaged 2004 Volkswagen Transporter sliding door through a process of rigorous subtraction. By peeling away commercial vinyl, the artist excavates the word “Trade” (a term rooted in Polari, carrying the nostalgia of old school queer code). What remains after reads like an offer of service: a clipped promise, a fragment glimpsed on a late-night hookup profile page. A door is built to regulate access: it opens, slides, withholds, and permits entry. Here, it becomes a threshold between longing and fantasy. The final “OOF” registers as visceral satisfaction, hovering at the edge of a lover’s physical impact. The work extends this tension into a paradox of power. In the gallery, Lu claims the cultural privilege to aestheticize a working-class livelihood, treating the door as canvas and artifact. Yet the edited text confesses an inversion: within the sexual economy of “trade,” the artist surrenders agency to the hyper-masculine ideal he pursues, ultimately revealing that the desire demands he be the one who serves.



Safe Sex 2 (2025)
Van Door, vinyl, laser cut on stainless Steel 
160cm x 120cm
Safe Sex 2 addresses the paradox of gay intimacy in London: high sexual accessibility coexists with emotional unavailability. While PrEP and doxyPEP produce a sense of sexual safety, romantic experience remains precarious, shaped by accelerated dating, racial hierarchy, idealized bodies and chemsex.


Take A Seat (2024)
Car doors, UV-printed vinyl, lase-cut acrylic, oil paint on acrylic, piercing ring, wood.
220cm x 170cm x 80cm
Using car doors as stand-ins for the idealized gay male body, this work explores self-objectification, desire, and shame. Industrial, masculine surfaces mirror fantasies of muscular perfection, while exposing my inability to escape a system I understand but remain bound to.

Stereo Heart (2026)
Carved salvaged car doors, tape, acrylic paint 
230 × 220 × 25 cm 
Shown on 21.02.26 at HARDWEAR by Goadome Nike, London
"Dear Peter, I hate when you invoke my name. It is not my name; it is an identity I constructed for this city, 9,000 miles from my site of origin. You will never truly comprehend me, or the archive of what I was. But, dear Peter, I love when I speak your name. It creates a rupture where, suspended in the precise temporality of those two spoken syllables, the heartbeat fractures the stereo, and I belong to you."


Overdrive  (2025)
Acrylic paint and marker pen on van doors, reflective tape, 3D print
210cm x 180cm
Valentines  (2026)
Car wing panel, found image printed on vinyl
75 x 120 x 20 cm
Guy Debord writes in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Today, this mediation has overtaken our most intimate desires. In an era of industrialized pornography, romantic ideals are packaged, priced, and narrowed by algorithms into consumable labels. This artwork questions whether genuine romantic tension can survive without becoming a sellable spectacle.


Mega Crush  (2025)
Car Seat, acrylic paint, exhaust pipe
190cm x 200cm

LTR (2025)
Leather, acrylic paint, rope, chains, piercing ring.
200cm x 200cm


4/4 (2025)
Mixed Media.
190cm x 60cm

Safe Sex (2024)
Car door, inkjet print on paper, acrylic paint, wood.
130cm x 110cm 


Dan Che (2024)
Single channel video 5'33''
Size Variable
Car multimedia display screen, reflection tape.
30cm x 25cm


I Go (2023)
UV-printed acrylic, laser-cut acrylic, acetate, stainless steel hanging system.
200cm x 100cm x 40cm