Overview
Lu is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies. With broad interests in Latin American literature and visual cultures, her work especially focuses on the Hispanophone Caribbean and Mexico in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Her current project examines how speculative aspirations toward outer space connect with Latin America’s recent history, concerning decolonization, nation-state formation, ecology, and nuclear anxieties. Through literature, cinema, and popular cultures, it contemplates how dynamics such as failure, loss, defect, and excess challenge the patriarchal, ableist, colonial, and anthropocentric paradigms that frame exploration as conquest and extraction. It shows how artworks link the individual body with the vast universe by exposing homologous structures of violence they both endure, while imagining spaces of belonging that transcend human and non-human boundaries.
Prior to Cornell, Lu worked as an assistant curator, editor, and project coordinator at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai and the Shanghai Biennial. Her most recent art review piece can be found on Intervenxions. She also translated Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente into Chinese. She received her BA and MA from Peking University.
While finalizing her dissertation, Lu reflects on her transcultural experiences. She recently wrote a personal essay titled “Chifan/Chifa,” which explores food and migration, drawing on her travel to Lima and her own migration experience in Canada. She is now working on another essay, reflecting on the global divergence of socialist legacies, from her perspective as a Latinamericanist who studies Cuba and its futuristic imaginations, and as someone who grew up in 1990s Northern China during the country’s early stage of economic reform.