In Studio with Z. Cecilia Lu:
medicine as material, body, worldview
Photo: Kahly Durst.
Z. Cecilia Lu spends most days in her studio, a generously windowed space in downtown Troy, New York, that she shares with a small tattoo studio. For her larger-scale ceramics and installation projects, she frequents a few communal facilities nearby. When we meet, Lu has just started a full-time, 9-to-5 remote job and is eager to dedicate more time to studio life. The artist has recently wrapped up a show at Collar Works, an experimental art space in Troy. Body Ajar included new sculpture and ceramic vessels as embodiments of healing, regeneration, death, and decay. A residency period in Jingdezhen–the iconic porcelain town–and Nanjing–where ceramic monuments and spiritways abound–inspired Lu with repetitive forms with various functional absurdities, such as three-legged wares and chicken-shaped spouts. Incorporating everything from body-scale Chinese cooking vessels and cast jujube dates to medicinal pulps swaddled in clay and stoneware mounds, the artist’s works are at once monstrous yet comforting and off-kilter in their alchemy of earthly materials. During our visit, we discuss the cultural specificities as well as amalgamations of references in her work. This is a reflection, in part, of growing up with traditional Chinese medicine, wellness culture in upstate New York, crip time and slow life, and her most recent research into mapping the mugwort plant—a botanical species considered invasive to the state.
Photo courtesy the artist.
In one corner of Lu’s studio, she is casting a particularly lumpy gourd in a large mold atop a testing area. Divided mainly into wet and dry zones, the studio is a realm of material remnants where most surfaces hold various capsules, reclaimed clay, precursors to final ceramic vessels, peach pits, and medicinal refuse. Having grown up going to traditional Chinese medicine doctors for various ailments, the artist continues to save various prescribed herbs that are brewed and then dehydrated: medicine becoming texture, pulp, and sculptural matter. As Lu describes it, the cosmology of traditional Chinese medicine, how it responds to and depends on the surrounding landscape and seasonal changes, has been foundational to her own practice. Food, in this way, becomes medicine, further tailored to one’s personal temperament and body type; it is a different way of experiencing illness or wellness, as well as coming into oneself. It isn’t about the individual herbs or cure even but about their interaction—a secret third thing created through transformation over time. In a similar vein, Lu’s work seeks out this activation process through not only the use of organic material but also performance, brewing, video, poetry, and folk song.
Photo courtesy the artist.
I note an excerpt from a text in which the artist reflects on her formative experiences with traditional Chinese medicine growing up in a Chinese American household in upstate New York. AN HERBAL-ORAL HISTORY: A TRANSLATION, A RECIPE fractures into autobiography, poetry, memory, and recipe, indeed. “Perhaps it was never about knowledge or language or understanding,” Lu writes, “but a neurotic need to think that this daily ritual of choking down bitter earth could do something that years and rounds of American doctors could not. / Could / That was always the lifeline.” This poignant expansion of a worldview beyond Western biomedicine, absolute cure, and objective knowing rhymes with Lu’s emphasis on articulating those embodied belief systems that shape one’s own “wellbeing” in the world. It reminds me of Carolyn Lazard’s Triple Canopy essay, “The World is Unknown,” about the artist’s management of autoimmune disease and the pursuit of alternative modes of care. “I’ve come to understand that the enemy of health is neither pharmaceuticals nor snake oil, but dogma,” Lazard begins. “The body is too unwieldy to fit within the schema of authoritative interpretation.”
Photo courtesy the artist.
For Lu, who also struggles with chronic health conditions, crip theory and the field of disabilities studies have helped shape how she thinks about our shared societal debility in a disintegrating, late-capitalist society. Her practice thus aims to visualize the spaces between binaries of human and nonhuman, life and death, while occupying a decaying in-between that is never wholly “well” yet open to alternate channels of pleasure, joy, intimacy, and ecstasy.
Lu’s studio holds a range of fiction and nonfiction titles, including Crip Genealogies, edited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich; view with a grain of sand: selected poems by Wislawa Szymborska; The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, translated with an introductory study by Ilza Veith; Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare; Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments by Mark Rosenthal; and An Atlas of Radical Cartography, edited by Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat.
Photo courtesy the artist.
Lu moved to the Capital Region when she was six and spent most of her formative years there. Then it was off to Ithaca, where she attended undergraduate at Cornell University. After graduation and a brief stint in New York City, she moved back to Troy, thinking about important personal ties to the landscape and drawn to Troy’s equidistance between metropolis and mountain, rewilding and resistance, or what the author Camille Dungy calls “writing from the provinces.” Lu’s current research for a project with the Soil Factory in Ithaca delves into the ethnobotany of mugwort, a plant native to Asia and Africa introduced to North America in the 1500s by Jesuit missionaries. Today, mugwort is classed as an invasive growth and often racialized as Asiatic in its pestilence, yet it is also valued for its medicinal properties, e.g. in anti-malarial drugs and COVID vaccines. As a dual agent of infection and healing, mugwort also serves as an apt metaphor for life unwillingly transplanted yet able to establish roots in a place where it is considered non-native and actively invasive. Lu tells me about how she is currently looking to partner with acupuncturists in the region to provide free moxibustion (burning of mugwort near acupoints), which has had its own challenges. At the moment, the studio’s dry zone is dominated by piles of eight-foot-tall mugwort plants, a gift from a friend with several outcrops in their front yard.
Z. Cecilia Lu, Loam-Foam Cradle II, 2024. Glazed stoneware, paper pulp, foam, 44 × 34 × 16 inches.
Photo courtesy the artist.
We come around to a grouping of map-like sketches on the artist’s far wall that indicates roadways between Troy and Ithaca, New York. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus travels from Troy to Ithaca, Greece, a journey across 500 miles over 10 years. Lu hopes to integrate this mythology into a new interspecies cartography involving mugwort of the upstate New York region. What does it mean to center mugwort as an indicator of the landscape or to center memory, healing, and other narratives in a map or journey through a place, particularly as a diasporic subject? For now, the artist is only beginning to weave together such narratives with the rich material investigations percolating in her work.
Z. Cecilia Lu, Bottle Gourd Requiem, 2023. Glazed stoneware, peach pits, bottle gourd, 20 × 21 × 21 inches.
Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Owen Barensfeld
by Danni Shen
Danni Shen is a curator and writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is currently organizing exhibitions at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Previous curatorial roles include positions at The Kitchen, Empty Gallery, and Wave Hill in New York. She has been a visiting critic at RISD, NYU-ITP, and Cornell AAP, critic-in-residence at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and curator-in-residence at Residency Unlimited. Shen is a contributor to various publications including BOMB magazine, Art in America, Heichi magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, AICA-USA’s magazine, and the Boston Art Review among others. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) Bard College.
