Cole Lu’s “The Engineers”

 

For Cole Lu, a recent series of high-profile shows in Asia—including the first in Taipei for the Taiwanese-born, New York-based artist—could be seen as a journey backward, and a return to his roots. However, for Lu, narratives emerge from multiple points of origin, all equally foundational. After all, roots do not grow backward, but spread, drawing life from myriad places, an understanding central to Lu’s practice of exhuming culture’s overarching records, as well as personal stories that compel us. With his sculptures, Lu dismantles the architecture, monuments, and imagery that buttress a Eurocentric understanding of history. In a number of previous works, he uses the parts of these dissections to rig up assemblages that reflect on the poetics of stories, while revealing the cracks in the grand narratives they uphold. Often, Lu harnesses fire and ash—the tools of primitive myth-making—to explore where stories begin and how they grow through us.