When Symbols Become Mimicry: Lu Ming-te and His Paradise
2024.8.3 - 2025.1.5 | Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art
Introduction
Lu Ming-te (b. 1950) has been an artist for over half a century. While studying at the University of Tsukuba in the early 1980s, he began to explore different creative materials and media, which sparked his interest in experimenting with media and interdisciplinary art. Before he moved to Kaohsiung’s Meinong in 2011, he already used mixed media, bringing together readymade objects, collaging, painting, and writing to create his works. After settling in Meinong, the subject of “ecosystem” started to appear in his creations frequently, and his works have often been incorporated into the pools, gardens, and green spaces near his studio, merging artificial “faux ecosystems” with real ecological sites.
This exhibition, set in the unique backdrop of the museum's garden, showcases Lu’s Cultural Simulacra Animals series. This series seamlessly blends manmade animals and ecosystems with the natural environment. Inside the museum and on the first floor, visitors can explore the artist’s early paintings and mixed media works, accompanied by his Hon An Ya series and the neon series Media is Everything. The second floor houses Lu’s large-scale, site-specific installation piece, Quartet, and several other series, including Flowers Are Not Flowers series, Ink Resonance series, and Botanic Five Color Flag. The third-floor gallery displays his three-dimensional work Invisible Landscape, with Psalm Series and several painterly pieces from the 1990s.
In the 1980s, Lu proposed the idea that “media is everything.” His recent creative style involves utilizing commercialized labels and custom-made, singular sculptural objects to explore how everyday modern items are used as media in the forms of symbols and products through “replication.” He particularly uses stickers to convey a playful quality and replicability, turning commonly found “materials” in today’s popular culture into identifiable “media,” shaping the unique simulacra and ecosystems in his work.
Artists' Profile
Lu Ming-te
Lu Ming-te was born in Kaohsiung in 1950, and has been a driving force in Taiwan’s new media art and interdisciplinary art scene. For years, he used images as symbols to create paintings with mixed media, earning a reputation for his unique painting style. When studying in Japan in the 1980s, Lu already stated, “Everything is Media, Media is Everything” – an idea that challenged the definition of two-dimensional painting and conveyed his understanding of society and media culture. After he graduated from the then Master’s Program in Plastic Art and Mixed Media at National Tsukuba University, he returned to Taiwan in 1985 and developed the framework of his “mixed media art theory” utilizing the diverse forms of contemporary art and the potentiality of inter-media creation that he learned in Japan, establishing his status in the history of Taiwanese contemporary art. In 2011, Lu settled down in Meinong, Kaohsiung, and increased his exploration of multiple issues, including ecological revolution, conservation of the natural environment, cloud community, and multi-culture. His practice now mainly revolves around experimentation that crosses species and space-time, utilizing two-dimensional painting, video and spatial installation, sculpture, readymade objects, performance, theater, and even collaboration with ecologists, geologists, and scientists to engage in interdisciplinary dialogues and artistic co-creation.
Curator/Ming Turner
Ming Turner is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Creative Industries Design at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan. She gained her PhD in Art History and Theory at Loughborough University in the UK. Writing in both Chinese and English, Ming has published several articles in a number of prominent journals and academic publications, including Infinitely Ephemeral: Contemporary Women’s Art in Taiwan, 2003-2023 (2024), Visual Culture Wars at the Borders of Contemporary China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), The Art of Contemporary Curation and Its Realisation: Body, Gender and Technology (2018), Crossing Borders: Transition and Nostalgia in Contemporary Art (2015). To date, she has curated more than 40 contemporary art exhibitions, examples of which include Profoundly Faceted: Debates on Contemporary Art in Tainan (Tainan Art Museum, 2024), Double Narratives (Siao-Long Cultural Park, 2024), Are You Working Now? (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2023), When Oceans Meets (Siao-Long Cultural Park, 2023-2024), Invisible Dimensions: 2019 Next Art Tainan, and Post-humanist Desires (Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, 2013-2014).