Yuming Lu

Yuming Lu (b. 1997) is a London based multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, photography and moving image. Born and raised in China, Lu moved to London in 2023.

Working from the perspective of a ‘gay newcomer’, Lu draws on the experience of moving between cultures and his own journey in London to critically examine the contradictions of contemporary queer culture. He considers how intimacy, aspiration and identity are shaped not simply by private feeling, but by social codes structured through physique, race and access, determining who is desired, who is overlooked, and who learns to make themselves legible through hypersexualization.

His experience has also led him to reflect on an environment in which freedom, openness and sexual accessibility coexist with objectification, emotional distance, power dynamics, racialised desirability and pressure around the body. Within a culture of hookups, fleeting encounters, non-monogamy, chemsex and commercialized decadence, where sexual accessibility is high and biomedical protection has reduced physical risk, Lu asks how emotional safety can still remain precarious.

In Lu’s recent works, salvaged car parts become metaphors for the idealised body within the contemporary gay imaginary and for the fantasies attached to it. Eye catching, masculine, polished and defensive, these objects stand in for bodies turned into surfaces of projection, perfection, obsession, status and control.

Through erotic and pornographic imagery in his work, Lu asks how desire is organised through repetition, display and circulation, and how others can become reduced to functional, replaceable bodies shaped by type, fantasy and script.

With a visual language of sharpened vulnerability and erotic sadness, Lu translates psychological and social conditions into material form. He hopes to make visible the environments that shape us: who dominates them, who holds power and why, how we look at others and wish to be seen ourselves, and what forms of submission, self-attack and aggression towards others are carried out beneath the surface. Ultimately, his practice asks how we might truly queer these inherited social structures and connections.

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

Art

01 Sculptures & Installations

02 Photography

03 Graphic Design

04 Editorial Fashion Video

05 TV Commercial Video