About
15 Seconds was a website project that took place in the month of September 2015. Lu Xu asked people to assign her tasks that she could accomplish within 15 seconds [ Schedule ]. Lu recorded the process and uploaded the videos [ Show ]. The project had been finished. The website is currently for archiving and viewing.
Lu Xu is originally from Guiyang, China, and has been studying and practicing art in the States for the last seven years. As an emerging artist, Lu has exhibited at Southfirst Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, NC, Elsewhere Museum, NC, and was a fellow artist at Franconia Sculpture Park, MN, in 2016.
Lu Xu is currently the Curator of Gatewood Gallery and Art Truck at School of Art, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She received her BA in Public Finance from Capital University of Economics and Business, in Beijing, BA in Fine Arts from Northern State University, South Dakota, and MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Through performative and participatory works, Lu situates herself in everyday life scenes, unfamiliar geographic locations, or in interactions with other people. Her works challenge the standard language and efficiencies in the mundane by being physically tiring, time consuming, absurd, obscure, unpredictable, and impractical, such as such as walking 72 miles in the suburbs in the San Francisco Bay area, dragging a five-foot long boat for 2.5 miles for a routine grocery shopping trip, incorporating origami to tell two coincidental stories in a circular subway line in Beijing, or asking people to assign me 15-second tasks through an online portal. She uses her body in neutral and low-key means as tools to reveal alternative, unfamiliar possibilities. She puts herself under challenging conditions in the context of the mundane in order explore unproductivity’s richness, aliveness, and poetry.