Ming Lu explores how power, mythology, and collective memory become naturalized in everyday visual experience. Through porcelain, embroidery, sculpture, and installation, she investigates how images, ornament, objects, and repetition transform ideology into material form, approaching collective memory not as distant history, but as a lived condition.

Rather than opposing tradition to contemporaneity, Lu treats traditional Chinese craftsmanship as a carrier of authority, memory, and cultural transmission. Through labor-intensive, deliberately imperfect processes, she reactivates porcelain, embroidery, and decorative forms as sites where ideology, heroism, gender, and mythology are aestheticized and normalized. Symbols of emperors, revolutionary figures, legendary characters, and popular media coexist within dense ornamental fields, where sacred imagery gradually dissolves into pattern and object.

A recurring strategy in her practice is role-play and transformation. By inserting herself into historical, mythological, and heroic archetypes, Lu reveals the performative structures underlying masculinity, leadership, and authority. Similarly, her engagement with femininity resists simple empowerment narratives; instead, she exposes how female figures circulate within grand historical storytelling, simultaneously central and marginal, symbolic yet voiceless.

Humor, absurdity, and visual excess function in her work not as decoration, but as destabilizing tools. By collapsing propaganda, folklore, personal memory, myth, and mass reproduction into materially rich objects, Lu questions how visual systems construct belief, loyalty, and belonging.

Operating between China and Europe, she positions herself neither as insider nor outsider, but as a witness to how power, memory, and mythology are stylized, inherited, embodied, and transmitted. Her practice invites viewers to consider how myths survive not only through monuments, but through objects, ornament, repetition, and everyday acts of cultural transmission.

2021 Tigress, Tigress. BBA Gallery, Berlin, Germany.

2020 Take Place. Bark Berlin, Germany.

2019 Take Place, 210 artists in a white cube. Institut für Alles Mögliche. Berlin, Germany.

2018 Pussy. SomoS Gallery, Berlin, Germany.