Cole Lu
The Engineers
The Museum and Library of Abbots of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara Rajavaravihara
Bangkok
Oct 24–Feb 25, 2025

For Cole Lu, a recent series of high-profile shows in Asia—including the first in Taipei for the Taiwanese-born, New York-based artist—could be seen as a journey backward, and a return to his roots. However, for Lu, narratives emerge from multiple points of origin, all equally foundational. After all, roots do not grow backward, but spread, drawing life from myriad places, an understanding central to Lu’s practice of exhuming culture’s overarching records, as well as personal stories that compel us. With his sculptures, Lu dismantles the architecture, monuments, and imagery that buttress a Eurocentric understanding of history. In a number of previous works, he uses the parts of these dissections to rig up assemblages that reflect on the poetics of stories, while revealing the cracks in the grand narratives they uphold. Often, Lu harnesses fire and ash—the tools of primitive myth-making—to explore where stories begin and how they grow through us.

At the Bangkok Art Biennale, in collaboration with Bangkok’s Nova Contemporary, Lu’s intervention took a monumental form. In the foyer of the Museum and Library of Abbots of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara Rajavaravihara, Lu pushed back the pews and opened portals—two sets of imposing wooden double doors. The Engineers (2024) comprises two triumphal arches carved from Thai neem wood in collaboration with artisans working in the area. These structures were a canvas for pyrographic etchings—drafted by Lu and carved out by these local woodworkers, before the artist embellished and texturized the images with blowtorches and soldering irons. Moored in the center of the library space, like twin lumps of fresh charcoal, every inch of these monumental gateways was scrawled with sooty reliefs, blackened by images transported from Lu’s earlier works or calling on historical instances of storytelling and myth-making. In Lu’s work, “myth” is like a substance. It bleeds from wood like sap, carbonizes into something else as the artist transforms it with fire.

Another reference that Lu is quick to bring up when speaking about the project is Rodin’s sculptural monument The Gates of Hell (1880). In his classic work, Rodin aimed to consume his audience with unknowable infernal possibilities, overwhelming them into self-reflective submission, their imaginations tantalized by the suggestive power of a sternly sealed door. Lu, on the other hand, left his door ajar. Indeed, the atmosphere in the library felt charged with the possibility of entry and transportation, the enigmatic crack beckoning one into the space. Where Rodin’s sculpture stokes reverence through visions of hellfire and damnation—some of the West’s most hardened cultural imagery, Lu’s work explores the possibility offered by a threshold to deconstruct and reevaluate the self; the implication that we might pursue such narratives to the point of unraveling, while also daring us to step through.

In doing so, The Engineers excavates origins—the stories of beginnings that we revere personally and as cultures at large. Lu’s affinity for European classical motifs may locate many of these myths within lineages of Western worldmaking. However, the illustrative etchings that punctuate his practice—enigmatic tableaus of fantastical creatures and landscapes—evidence a drive to decode the basal poetic DNA that fortifies all acts of storytelling. Uncanny clusters of the vaguely familiar, Lu’s sculptures act as signposts that point from our present to stories beyond our recognition.

Ultimately, Lu’s work is a proposition toward magical thinking. Rather than remaining stupefied at the gates, as Rodin might have it, the work allows us to believe in being transported. Stretched across the opening of his second arch, a burnt canvas shows a deer craning its neck as a portal darts across a serene sky. It is like a myth glimpsed from within a myth, which underscores Lu’s insistence on looking toward alternative possibilities that resist even our grandest narratives.

Christopher Whitfield is a Taipei-based writer and educator.

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