Hongyu Luo
Bio.
Hongyu Luo is a Chinese artist based in London, working across moving image, installation, performance, and artists' books. Her practice unfolds like a fragile manuscript, written in dissolving sugar, bodily traces, and the fleeting pages of handmade books, where illness, paradoxical perception, endurance, and healing are inscribed into matter. She consistently engages with the vulnerability of the body, the struggles of self-resistance, and spiritual health, which counter hegemonic biopower discourses. Currently, positioning the artists’ books as the center of her practices, she is fascinated by books that want to be handled and examined closely, books that offer ways of reconfiguring one's dynamic relationship with either materiality, or the self and the other, and ultimately with our living world. She received her Mres in Visual Culture in 2024 and an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2021.
Her works often begin with unstable materials and subtle gestures. “Melting” and “Testimony of Melting” (2021) employ burnt sugar sculptures and looping videos, staging the slow process of dissolution under gravity and chronic conditions, turning impermanence into a metaphor of resilience. “Go-( )-Stairs” (2021) transforms the staircase into an uncanny geometry, destabilizing the spatial ground of the body and the concept of habitat. In “The Impossible Measurement” (2021), the artist questions the closeness between bodies,tracing and retracing outlines until fatigue interrupts, converting intimacy and exhaustion into form. Together, these works translate fragility into both an aesthetic and conceptual force.
Experimental books form an essential thread of her practice. “Every Flutter Toward the Sky”（WIP, 2025）and “Carry Around” (2024), are independent publications transforming marginalised experience into portable archives, weaving them into collective narratives. Within her practice, the book becomes a breathing form in which disappearance and memory recursively coexist.
Her works have been shown internationally, including “The Proper Slowness” (London Micro Sculpture Fair, 2022), “Rain Decides To Turn The World Seven Hours Back”（UK-Mexican Art Society, 2021), and “In-Voices” (Access+, 2021). Between material fragility, bodily struggle and poetic endurance, Luo constructs an aesthetic of persistence and resistance.