3-A Gallery, CICA Museum
September 10 – 14, 2025
2025.9.10 – 14
Lexicon in Flux
My practice investigates the instability of language and its capacity to exist beyond communication. I work with painting, installation, animation, and hybrid forms to explore how script functions as both a visual structure and a cultural construct. By fragmenting, distorting, or fictionalising text, I seek to unsettle the authority of writing and to reimagine its role as image, material, and trace. Across Chinese and English, I am interested in the slippages that occur when words are displaced, translated, or visually reconfigured. These moments of interruption and transformation reveal language not as a transparent medium, but as a field of power, memory, and imagination. In my works, writing often drifts into abstraction or reassembles into unfamiliar configurations, asking viewers to encounter it outside the comfort of clarity. What interests me is how writing can be reimagined once it is freed from its obligation to explain. Rather than presenting language as fixed meaning, I approach it as a site of negotiation, instability, and play. My works invite audiences to inhabit the tension between legibility and opacity, and to consider how language shapes, limits, and opens perception.
Lulu Ao is a contemporary artist based in the UK. Her practice explores the visual structure of language through painting, installation, experimental animation, and hybrid forms. Working across Chinese and English, she investigates how written forms carry cultural memory, regulate meaning, and shape perception. Her works often fragment, distort, or fictionalise script, inviting viewers to engage with language not only as a system of communication, but also as a visual and material presence. Grounded in both studio practice and critical research, Ao’s work questions the authority of language and its role in constructing knowledge. She is particularly interested in how meaning shifts across linguistic and cultural contexts, and how language can be reimagined through interruption, translation, and visual experimentation. By destabilising textual clarity, her work opens new spaces for thought, affect, and interpretation. Ao recently completed a practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Loughborough University (UK). She also holds an MA in Fine Art from University of the Arts London, in addition to an earlier MA and BA in Fine Art from institutions in China. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Künstlerbund Tübingen (Germany), Vienna Contemporary Art Space (Austria), Division of Labour (UK), Being 3 Gallery (China), Yuan Xiaocen Museum (China), SUNC Contemporary Art Center (China), and the London Art Biennale 2025. In the UK, she has held solo exhibitions at Charnwood Arts and Sir Robert Martin Hall Gallery. Her works are included in private collections across Europe and China, including by collectors known for their engagement with critical and conceptual art.
