About

I am an interdisciplinary artist and recovering actor, originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand and now based in NYC. I spent the better part of a decade as a professional actor in television, film and theater, making-believing myself into roles including a Power Ranger (Silver) and a doctor on New Zealand’s only soap opera. After trying to separate my acting background from my art practice for some years, I realized that my experience with scripts, set and cameras has given me a useful methodology with which to explore ideas and practices of performance while being in dialogue with a history of performance art that has often taken pains to distance itself from the theater and ideas of the spectacle that the entertainment industry embodies. 

.I make video, objects, installations and performances, with a carnivalesque sensibility, often using pop culture as a critical lens. I can’t help but care about ideas of performance, particularly given how our contemporary moment demands that we perform our private and professional lives,  where our commodified labor must also be accompanied by demonstrations of passion and enthusiasm. I’m interested in this imperative to perform and its relationship to a mode of capitalism that extracts surplus value via affect and subjectivity, where economic and cultural achievement seems, for many, dependent on one’s quasi dramatic self performance.

I have an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and held residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the International Studio and Curatorial Program , Flux Factory, the Wassaic Project and Enjoy Contemporary Art Space (NZ). I have exhibited and performed throughout New Zealand, Chicago and NYC including at Te Tuhi, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, The Physics Room and Enjoy Contemporary Artspace in NZ, Mana Contemporary, Roots & Culture and CoProsperity in Chicago and anonymous gallery, Flux Factory, iiddr and Socrates Sculpture Park in NYC.

email: lhu700@gmail.com

instagram: @outraged994

Resume/CV available on request.