CFGNY Puddles into Pond

At Amant, CFGNY pays homage to and builds on the legacy of the No Name Painting Association (無名畫會 Wuming Huahui) as a framework for thinking about collective practice under conditions of constraint. The collective has constructed an artificial landscape traversed by a bridge clad in stuffed animal fur. This environment is ornamented with dish-like ceramic tiles produced by thirteen invited friends, peers, and long-standing collaborators. Mounted together on a shared armature, these vessels together suggest an abstracted pond, each functioning as an individual receptacle that contributes to a larger, composite surface. The gatherings, conversations, and shared labor that produced the tiles are an integral component of the resulting sculpture itself; in this way, the installation extends CFGNY’s ongoing interest in collective production, echoing the Wuming group’s creation of landscapes as a quietly radical communal act.

Invited artists:
Ami Lien
Stewart Uoo
sgp
Cherisse Gray
Cole Lu
Covey Gong
Lotus L. Kang
Avena Gallagher
Cici Wu
Elliot Reed
Ming Lin
Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần
Diane Severin Nguyen

On view at Amant from March 19 - August 16, 2026

Fire Lips

In Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, Anne Carson transposes the Greek mythological figure Geryon into a contemporary coming-of-age story. Once a red, winged monster slain by Heracles’ arrow, Geryon is reimagined as a queer teenager navigating questions of identity and desire. In comparing Geryon’s turbulent inner life to volcanic activity, Carson traces the tension between repression and eruption:

Geryon sat on his bed in the hotel room pondering about the cracks and fissures
of his inner life. It may happen
that the exit of the volcanic vent is blocked by a plug of rock, forcing
molten matter sideways along
lateral fissures called fire lips by volcanologists. [1]

The group exhibition Fire Lips takes this dynamic image of blockage and eruption to explore instances of repression and the urgent expressions that circumvent them. Repression here is understood both psychologically and politically: as the mechanism that excludes distressing ideas, feelings, and impulses from consciousness, and as forms of oppression that constrain agency and participation in social and political life. The works gathered in the exhibition display how bodies, voices, and desires are regulated and suppressed within societal structures, while also evoking how the repressed forges new paths and surfaces like fissures and cracks in the dominant order of things. Johanna Thorell, curator

With contributions by, among others, Anne Carson, VALIE EXPORT, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, Cole Lu, mhm, mhm, Evelyn Plaschg, Miriam Stoney, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor
Curated by Johanna Thorell

[1] Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red. A Novel in Verse (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), 105.

The Interjection Calendar is a project devised and hosted by Montez Press. Each month an artist or writer is commissioned to produce a new piece of work for release on our website. At the end of the year the collection is published, demonstrating a diverse range of collaborations and experimental works, mapping the year in contemporary art writing, with equal space held for the emerging and the established. The Calendar reflects the current importance of online content media, pushing the relationship between image and text in this domain.

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February’s contribution to IC012 is Cole Lu’s experimental preposition, ‘How Does The Voice Travel?’.

Guest edited by Christopher Whitfield.

Cole Lu (b. Taipei) lives and works in New York. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, and writing, Lu’s practice explores myth, memory, and the architectures of displacement. His work engages material translation through wood burning, fire, linen, copper, found objects, and concrete, activating poetics of survival, orientation, and coded refusal. Language operates not only as text but as texture, carving lexicons into matter and myth into structure.

Lu has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (Portland), Herald St (London), Each Modern (Taipei), and the Bangkok Art Biennale. His work will be featured in upcoming 2026 exhibitions at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University (Cambridge) and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Recent group exhibitions include Aranya Art Center (Qinhuangdao), Kunsthal N (Copenhagen), Bortolami (New York), Tina Kim Gallery (New York), and Nova Contemporary (Bangkok).

His writing has appeared in Coffee House Press, Inpatient Press, and WONDER, with forthcoming work from Montez Press. His work is held in the collections of DIB Bangkok Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Library, and has been featured in Frieze, Artforum, Flash Art, ArtReview, and ArtAsiaPacific.

He was recently Artist-in-Residence at Bangkok Kunsthalle.

Cole Lu will present new work with Herald St at ARTEFIERA, 2026.

Cole Lu will present new work with Herald St at FOG Design+Art, 2026.

Cole Lu will present new work with Herald St at Frieze London 2025.

As She Descends

The group exhibition As She Descends features 39 artworks across painting, video, sculpture, sound, and installation by 18 Chinese and international artists, including 17 newly commissioned works. The exhibition also highlights a selection of archival documents thoughtfully assembled by the curatorial team.

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The legend of Lady Meng Jiang, a national-level intangible cultural heritage, has evolved and spread across China for nearly two thousand years, with particular resonance in Qinhuangdao. The story of Lady Meng Jiang, who embarked on a distant journey for love and brought down the Great Wall with her weeping—has spread far and wide in folk oral traditions, and has been constantly recounted in various forms of plays, folk songs, customs, and rituals. It reflects the emotions of the people in different times across different historical periods and has played a lasting role in shaping the imagination, order, and morality of society.

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This exhibition invites artists from China and across Asia to respond to this legend, in an attempt to release Lady Meng Jiang from classicalist readings and engage more open-ended, diverse aspects of her figure. It asks: can grief be understood as a form of energy rather than a sign of weakness? Can love be seen as an act of agency rather than of submission?

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Long rooted in folklore ,the legend has also served as a marker for mass culture. The exhibition title itself is drawn from a classic pop song from the turn of the century. Modern and contemporary novelists such as Zhang Henshui and Su Tong have written versions of the legend, while Gu Jiegang’s research of Lady Meng Jiang pioneered the field of Chinese folklore studies. These creative and scholarly attempts demonstrate that re-storying is not to indulge nostalgia; but to reposition and renew. Taking “restorying” as its methodology, this exhibition invites viewers to consider how “She” might encounter the contemporary after descending from symbolism.

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This exhibition is organized by guest curator Yuan Fuca and Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, together with Associate Curator Wu Yiyang and Curatorial Assistant Li Fangwen.

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Participating Artists * commissioned works

Nadiah Bamadhaj*

Michele Chu*

Duan Zhaonan*

Duan Zhengqu

Köken Ergun

Covey Gong*

Saodat Ismailova

Jane Jin Kaisen

Liang Jiezhen and Wan Qing

Cole Lu*

NAOMI*

Susan Philipsz

Sun Yitian*

Fuyuhiko Takata

Wen Hui

Xie Qun*

Yu Youhan

Zhang Wenzhi

Barbana Bojadzi, Jake Grewal, Cole Lu

Bortolami Gallery is pleased to present a three-person exhibition with Barbana Bojadzi, Jake Grewal, and Cole Lu in the Upstairs.

The show features new paintings, including a three-part fifteen-foot work, by London-based artist Jake Grewal, a constellation of burnt birch panels by Cole Lu, and introduces Kosovan artist Barbana Bojadzi’s multimedia works on rigid insulation sheeting. Within their variety of methods, the artists each mine the elements, capturing our collective and primordial response to the natural world. As humanity builds within its ever-expanding confines, so does the tension between its environment and its accrued memories and rituals. The artists’ negotiations with fire, water, and the atmospheric are imbued with this tenuousness.

The liminal space where land and water meet is the site in which Grewal stakes his claim in this new series of work. Allegory and objectivity commingle to produce the artist’s contemplative style, wherein figures and landscape concurrently build space. With translucent application and airiness of palette, dense rock formations and groups of persons seemingly emerge, caught in their traversals. These figures’ explorations are ambiguous and without intention; they cross Grewal’s terrain of light, water, and rock in the same way as the viewer’s scanning, with unhurried and deliberate surveying.

Recalling the virtuosic surfaces of Old Masters’ etchings as much as the primal markings of prehistoric caves, Cole Lu’s burnt panels encapsulate an impossible span of time and the foundation of humanity. Within a grand, overarching purview of civilization lies a personal and mythological storytelling that registers between the individual recollection and a cross-historical collective. For the exhibition, Lu presents artworks which call to mind architectural elements from an absented site, a fireplace and a pair of clerestory windows, conjuring the memories of a non-place yet leaving them open as potential portals.

Seen from their side, Barbana Bojadzi’s multi-media panels evidence, in their pastel blue and bubble gum pink, the character of their making. The support, nested beneath swaths of textural colors, produced from a variety of varnishes and paints, are heavy-duty construction panels. Through the reclamation of these humble materials, Bojadzi suggests history’s stratification, layered and built. These highly produced and synthesized surfaces also recall blustering plein-air scenes, like a Turner produced from the industrial materials of its time.m description

Cole Lu will present works with BORTOLAMI at Art Basel Hong Kong 2025.

UNDER THE TALKING TREE

1. March - 3. August 2025

Some trees grow straight up into the heavens. Their deep roots draw up memories of how everything came to be, the essence of everything, and its finality. Their branches are laden with heavy fruit. Myths, our stories, and conceptions of the future. ‘Under the Talking Tree’ is a curated group exhibition presenting 12 contemporary Asian diasporic artists. The exhibition is about narrative. The story of us as humans. Our many differences and many similarities. It’s about mythology, more precisely about stories from Asian mythologies.

The exhibition is curated by Kathy Huang and supported by Statens Kunstfond, Beckett-Fonden and Erik Borger Christensen Fond.

Exhibition Documentation: David Stjernholm

The Engineers is a solo exhibition by Cole Lu as part of the Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB2024): Nurture Gaia, which will run from October 24, 2024 to February 25, 2025.  

The Engineers is a site-specific installation at The Museum and Library of Abbots of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara, a first-class royal temple complex built in the early nineteenth century.  Combining Thai, Chinese, Khmer, and European influences, the temple is home to the first  Buddhist educational institution and is also the ordination site for many Chakri kings and royal  family members. The Gothic-style Museum and Library serves as a significant repository of Thai Buddhist knowledge, housing countless religious artifacts and monastic utensils associated with  the four Supreme Patriarchs who resided at the temple.  

The title of the exhibition references Lu’s questioning of engineers as architects of humanity, and  the myth-making origins of our social hierarchy. Through two large-scale, free-standing doors  burned from Neem (Sao Dao) wood and linen, Lu explores time and time travel, historical texts,  religious scriptures, mythologies, and ancient artifacts. Using fire to mark his gestures, he also  returns to a possible origin of storytelling before social construction, delving into issues of  history, memory, and home. The paired doors echo the space’s original entries, acting as portals  into an infinite Universal cycle between birth and death.  

More information can be found here.

Nova Contemporary presents In saying these things, I went to sleep, a group exhibition of works by Cole Lu, Christian Quin Newell, and Supawich Weesapen. The exhibition draws its title from Of Virtue, a fourth-century text by the Alexandrian alchemist Zosimos, in which he uses dream to decipher the mysteries of the waking world.

 Inspired by this sense of alchemical slippage—where boundaries shift between slumber and waking, solid and liquid, and body and spirit—the three artists take on the role of shapeshifters, engaging in a kinetic play with the elements. Here, matter is torn apart and reassembled, creating new forms of substance and self. Their works ruminate in an instability of form, offering passages we can traverse on route to becoming.

Lu’s works embody calcination, the first stage of alchemy, where intense burning and decomposition is used to reduce matter to its purest form. He intricately burns onto copper and linen, initiating a process that is simultaneously destructive and generative. Depicting images of the mythical and premodern, including an engraving of the Black Sun—representative of the shadow self and renewal through darkness–he presents a space where material, identity, and consciousness can be broken down and reinvented.

Here, the gallery takes up the fourth element, becoming a spatial vessel for dynamic elemental dialogue. The three artists capture an impulse to compose and recompose, making room for us to transfigure, transmute, and ascent. 

More information can be found here.

Join Nova Contemporary and Bangkok Kunsthalle for a conversation between Cole Lu and Hera Chan, Adjunct Curator, Asia-Pacific, supported by Asymmetry Art Foundation, at Tate. 

 The event will take place next to Lu’s previous studio at Bangkok Kunsthalle, where he was artist-in-residence. His completed works will be on view at the Museum and Library of the Abbots of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara, as part of the Bangkok Art Biennale 2024 (BAB2024): Nurture Gaia, from October 24, 2024, to February 25, 2025. 

 The two will examine Lu’s engagement with materiality, alchemical processes, and writing. They will explore themes including portals and travel, and the interplay between exile, diaspora, and history. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session. 

This event is supported by the Culture Division, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Thailand.

More information can be found here.

Bangkok Kunsthalle hosted Cole Lu as its artist in residence during production for his exhibition The Engineers, co-hosted by the Bangkok Art Biennale and Nova Contemporary. The completed works are now on view at the Museum and Library of Abbots of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara until 28 Feb, 2025.

See the production video of The Engineers here.

Cole Lu present works with Herald St at Frieze London 2024.

Each Modern is thrilled to announce “Interstellar Traveler to Home” by Cole Lu and Djordje Ozbolt in Taiwan. This captivating showcase delves deep into the intricate interplay between personal narratives and broader cultural, political, and historical contexts, offering a thought-provoking exploration of human perception and evolution.

Djordje Ozbolt’s paintings emanate a sculptural presence that captivates the imagination, blending clear forms with expansive classical backgrounds to create a visual language that transcends traditional boundaries. His vibrant use of colors and whimsical narratives challenge the viewer’s expectations, inviting them to explore the depths of memory, personal identity, and societal norms through a surreal and thought-provoking lens.

Cole Lu’s artistic vision is a testament to his unique approach to image-making, where he skillfully reshapes familiar atmospheres with a quasi-prophetic fervor, infusing his works with a strikingly innovative essence. Through intentional use of color palettes and expressive forms reminiscent of poetry and literature, Lu’s creations exude a sense of drama and rugged beauty, inviting viewers to embark on a journey of introspection and discovery.

The exhibition will open on 20 July, from 4 p.m. with an artist talk of Cole and Djordje in conversation with curator Alex Jen. The reception will follow at 5.30 p.m.

Watch Cole’s interview here.

More information about the exhibition can be found here.

Cole Lu: Stoicheion: Jul 12 – September 15, 2024

In Stoicheion, New York-based artist Cole Lu examines established social hierarchies and their myth-making origins. "Stoicheion," the Greek title of Euclid's Elements and Aristoxenus's Elements of Harmonics, has held various meanings, including “the length of the shadow of a sundial,” “the stars or astral bodies as elements of fire,” or more commonly “the smallest parts of anything which stand in relation to one another.” Like a makeshift nursery from Ridley Scott's Raised by Wolves, Cole Lu's dodecahedron shelter presents the viewer with an otherworldly space to consider the fundaments of "humanity."

Cole Lu’s Stoicheion suggests the site of an archeological dig featuring cast concrete reliefs and an excavation sheltering system covered by linen. Imagery is burnt into the fabric, incised into concrete, and charred into the wood to recompose the beginning of beginnings through these fragments and "relics." Moving through material, language, and various mark-making gestures, Stoicheion tells the story of a new possible foundation.

For more information visit here.

Herald St is delighted to announce Amnesia, an exhibition of new works by Cole Lu taking place in the gallery’s East London premises. Featuring burnt linen and birch panels alongside large-scale sculptures incised in minute detail, the presentation questions language, contexts, and dogmas of historicisation. Lu exposes humanity’s ‘collective amnesia’, looking back to an existence before socially-imposed beliefs and rituals and yearning for an unadulterated state of being. He references an amalgamation of sources, widely ranging from prehistoric cave markings, Greek mythology, canonical twentieth century art and literature, and popular sci-fi cinema, steeping their events and characters with his own lived experience.

For more information, visit here.

Cole Lu will present new work with Herald St at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024.

Cole Lu will present new work with Herald St at Frieze London 2023.

Inpatient Press is pleased to announce their latest publication FIRST PYLON by Cole Lu, a compendium of the artist's vellum illustrations and writing. Melding mythological references with personal history, FIRST PYLON gathers the precursor illustrations to his pieces made of burnt wood panels and linen, accompanied by a corresponding collection of his poetry and writing, tracing what came before the fire and envisioning a new mythos born from beyond the flame. With an introduction by Paul Legault.

Please join Cole and Inpatient Press on 5 October 6-8 pm for the launch party at Mast Books (72 Avenue A, New York, NY 10009), with a reading of Paul Legault, Kim Rosenfield, and Chloe Tsolakoglou, coinciding with an installation at the bookstore.

Reading begins at 7 pm.