YUMING LU: POLISHED BODIES, FRACTURED INTIMACIES

Yuming Lu is a London-based artist and fashion film director whose practice spans photography, sculpture, installation, and moving image. With a background as Fashion Video Editor and In-house Director at Harper’s BAZAAR China, and as a commercial collaborator with luxury fashion houses including CHANEL, Bottega Veneta, and Ferragamo, Lu brings a refined editorial eye to his personal work - yet one that refuses to smooth over the fissures of desire, identity, and disconnection.

Currently pursuing an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins with a focus on contemporary photography, Lu uses his visual language - polished yet unsettling - to investigate the contradictions of queer life and love. At the heart of his work is an ambivalence: the desire for intimacy and the simultaneous fear of exposure, the aesthetics of perfection and the alienation they conceal. His installations draw upon his editorial instincts while subverting their logic, offering sleek surfaces that fracture upon contact.

In Lu’s visual universe, objects become surrogates - cars, swings, latex, chrome - standing in for bodies that are idealized, disciplined, disembodied. These are not just metaphors but material explorations of queer longing: filtered through desire, commodity, performance, and the politics of protection. His works ask what it means to seek love in a culture of spectacle, and whether vulnerability can survive when every gesture is already a pose.

Yuming Lu crafts a visual fiction where the codes of fashion and the logic of intimacy collide. The result is a practice as seductive as it is critical - one that shines with surface, and cuts with reflection.

Safe sex 2, 2024

In Safe sex 2, Lu returns to the car as icon and idol - a gleaming stand-in for the ideal partner: solid, smooth, built for protection. This machine becomes both fetish and fortress, a fantasy of safety in the precarious landscape of queer desire.

Set against a backdrop of biomedical access - PrEP, DoxyPEP, and routinized testing - the work reflects on a new era of “safe sex” where physical risk is reduced, but emotional exposure remains perilous. In sculpting and fetishizing the protective surface, Lu questions whether this armor creates intimacy or shields us from it.

The latex draped over the car evokes both sensuality and sterility, and the mirrored surface catches viewers in its frame, implicating them in the economies of desire, scrutiny, and performance. This is not a work about safety as moral virtue, but safety as illusion, discipline, and longing.

LTR, 2025

LTR—short for “long-term relationship” - begins in irony and ends in ache. The installation features a scorched sex swing, suspended by heavy chains, its surface charred and fragile. At first glance, it reads as a witty commentary on hookup culture and the gamified dynamics of contemporary queer love. But linger longer, and the work reveals a quieter vulnerability: the desire to be held, the fear of being seen as earnest, the ache of irony turned hollow.

The singed fabric becomes a relic - of pleasure, of failure, of attempts at connection scorched by performance. A subtle ambient track loops in the background, intimate yet distant, like a memory of warmth that never quite returns.

Through this work, Lu reflects on the emotional architecture of queer relationships, where the desire to be loved is often buffered by detachment. LTR is not a rejection of love, but a meditation on the ways it is negotiated, performed, and quietly mourned.

Images: ©Yuming Lu, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: MIAO