Field Review | Artist Interview Series
In conversation with
Bing Lu
Bing Lu (鲁冰) (b. 1999) is a Chinese photographer from Beijing, China. She graduated with a BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, and a MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her photographic series include unconditional, 2019 - 2022; like this, like that, i’m starting to crack, 2024; what remains after the image, 2026 - ongoing. Working across portraiture, abstraction, and alternative processes, Lu’s photography engages an ongoing inquiry into the assumed objectivity of the image and the construction of meaning, examining how images are produced, mediated, and understood as both a physical object and a cumulative record of collective seeing. Her photographic series have been exhibited at Gallery 60 NYC, Photographic Resource Center, The Curated Fridge, Syosset Library Gallery, Raynham Hall Museum, and PH21 Photography Gallery,. Her photographs have appeared in numerous publications including Art Poetry Journal, Visual Art Journal, Float Photo Magazine, FIGGI Magazine, and Roundcube. Lu currently lives in New York City.
From:
Artist Statement
Working primarily with a medium-format camera, Lu creates photographic prints that investigate the emotional residue of domestic spaces and the wilderness once encountered. The work begins from a persistent sense of discontent. Early attempts at straightforward image-making felt overly resolved; the photographs were too complete to hold the tension of lived experience. In response, Lu began to interrupt the notion of the "perfect image." Through physical interventions—including cutting, masking, and recombining—Lu disrupts photographic coherence. The resulting images oscillate between flatness and depth, familiarity and estrangement, while retaining ghostly traces of their original forms.
Each work documents a process of imaginative revision, examining how images shape, distort, and reconstruct meaning in an age of saturated visual information. Influenced by Alfred Stieglitz's concept of the Equivalent, Lu approaches photography as a space for orientation rather than representation—a portal to something larger than itself. Photography is understood not as an instantaneous act of capture but as a gradual process that resists instant gratification, preserving both the material traces of its making and the presence of the artist's hand.
Tell us about yourself and your artistic background.
I grew up in Beijing and now live in New York. I studied photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston before completing my MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2024. Looking back, my practice has changed quite a bit. Earlier on I was primarily interested in portraiture and photographing strangers I encountered. Over the past few years, my work has gradually become more abstract and materially driven.
After graduating, I spent a year working with galleries in New York, which expanded my view on how artworks circulate and how institutions shape the way they're experienced. During the same period, my personal life changed in ways I hadn't anticipated. I stopped making images for a while, but I don't think the work really stopped. It was accumulating somewhere else. Eventually, photography became the way I could return to those hard moments and begin to understand them.
How would you describe your artistic practice?
I think of photography less as a way of preserving moments than as a way of experimenting with them. I'm interested in what happens after an image is made. How does it continue to change? What happens when memory no longer matches the photograph, or when a photograph begins to mean something completely different from what it originally recorded? A lot of my work involves returning to existing images through cropping, layering, and erasure. Those gestures allow me to slow down and stay with an image long enough for something unexpected to emerge. I start to let go of arriving at a fixed answer, and accept meaning to remain unsettled.
What themes or ideas are most important in your work?
I keep returning to intimacy, absence, and the instability of memory. I'm looking at how relationships continue to shape us even when the subject is no longer physically present. There are experiences that don't really end. They change form over time. Photography seems uniquely capable of holding that tension because it always exists somewhere between evidence and imagination. I'm also drawn to ambiguity. We live among so many overlapping realities: personal, social, historical… and I don't think photographs need to flatten that complexity. They can hold a tension without resolving it, and I think that's where much of their emotional power comes from.
What inspires your creative process?
Usually it begins with something I can't quite explain. Sometimes it's a feeling that lingers much longer than I expect. Sometimes it's a landscape I've walked through repeatedly, or an old photograph that suddenly feels unfamiliar. I'm interested in those moments when something ordinary begins to shift, when I realize I'm seeing it differently than I did before. I also spend a lot of time looking. Not necessarily photographing, just looking. I think making photographs and learning how to see are really the same process.
Can you tell us about a recent artwork or project?
My recent series series grew out of a long period of separation from someone very important to me. We exchanged photographs over time, and eventually I found myself returning to the archive. I began revisiting and disrupting the images. As parts disappeared, other details became more visible. I wasn't trying to reconstruct the past. I was trying to understand what remained after memory had already changed it. The work isn't really about nostalgia. I am drawn to what continues to endure emotionally after one certainty has collapsed, and how images can carry that persistence even as their meanings continue to shift.
What challenges have influenced your development as an artist?
Learning to continue without knowing exactly where things are going. For a long time, I felt that every project needed to arrive somewhere clear and resolved. Now I trust the process much more. Sometimes the work needs to remain unresolved for quite a while before I understand what it's asking of me. This past year was difficult personally. There were experiences I couldn't immediately translate into photographs. At first that felt like failure, then I thought that not making work was also part of the work. It gave those experiences time and space to settle before I returned to them.
What role does art play in your life today?
It's a way of paying attention and slowing down. Photography always asks me to stay with something longer than I normally would, whether that's a person, a memory, or a feeling I don't fully understand yet. I don't think creativity has given me answers. If anything, it's made me more comfortable living with questions. That feels important to me, both as an artist and as a person.
What are you currently working on?
Right now I'm continuing 'what remains after the image' and developing it toward a photobook. I've become increasingly interested in the book form. It holds sequence, rhythm, revelation, and the passage of time in a very particular way. Turning pages allows images to accumulate, interrupt one another, and unfold gradually. That feels closely aligned with what this project is trying to do, where meaning emerges through repetition, absence, and slow looking rather than through a single image.
What are your future goals as an artist?
I hope to keep making work that feels honest to my own experience and becomes a living record of the questions I'm trying to understand. I also hope the work can extend beyond me. If someone encounters an image and feels a little more seen, a little less alone, or finds space for reflection, empathy, or healing, then I think the work has done something meaningful. I do believe art can quietly change the way we inhabit it.
Where can readers follow your work?
The best places to follow my work are my website and Instagram. I share new projects, exhibitions, and works in progress there.
