About

Sculptor and installation artist.

As both a daughter and mother coming from an East Asian diaspora, I have my own share of emotional trauma and baggage. Guilt, pressure, selfishness, vanity, pride, selflessness, truth and authenticity. Externally my life appears aesthetic, internally it feels a mess. I try to bring out these conflicts of internal and external in my work. Although the work is personal to me, I believe the struggle beneath is universal.

I’m currently producing sculptures predominantly with metal mesh. I enjoy its many contrasts; rigid yet fluid, opaque and translucent, the way in which silhouettes from the final pieces cast upon the wall and how such a delicate material can also be so sharp and penetrating. I find a great satisfaction watching layer upon layer, piece upon piece, come together to form something more than the sum of its parts.

Biography

Lufeianna was born in Chiangmai, Thailand, 1975; the heart of the Golden Triangle and opium trade at the time. Her mother was a young aboriginal mountain girl and her father an Intelligence Officer with the Nationalist ‘lost army’.

Together they became part of the diaspora that would relocate between Burma and Thailand before eventually repatriating to Taiwan in 1980. There she lived as a refugee in a military Juancun during the final years of the White Terror period of martial law.

At age 16, Lufeianna’s parents were able to send her to high school in Vancouver, Canada. After graduation, she returned to Taiwan and completed a college diploma in Business Management before coming back to the growing family hospitality business she first worked for as a child.

Dissatisfied with the work and longing for creativity, Lufeianna enrolled in night classes, completing both an Undergrad and her Masters in Fashion Design over a six year period from 2002 to 2008. During this time she participated in China Fashion Week 2007, winning third place in the lingerie category.

Wanting to expand and challenge her creativity further, Lufeianna relocated to London and completed a Womenswear Postgrad at Central Saint Martins in 2008. It was in the UK where her creativity broadened considerably, participating in a number of art and design exhibitions. Her exploration of fashion quickly began incorporating other materials – notably industrial meshes – which enabled her to explore use of space in ways fabrics could not.

Lufeianna married and returned to Taiwan with her husband in 2012, where she immediately began taking on interior design projects to explore spatial design further. As her work progressed, she began incorporating her own sculptures and installation pieces into her interiors, focusing again on industrial materials and found objects. During this time, she took part in various exhibitions, as well as completing a number of commissions including an installation for the International Lantern Festival in 2016. During this time she had three children, which led her to begin exploring the conflicts and connections between between motherhood and daughterhood.

A desire to interpret her troubled and conflicted upbringing through art led to the decision to return to the UK and her husband’s hometown of Milton Keynes in 2020. Since relocating her work has been selected for exhibitions at MK Gallery and the Milton Keynes Open. In 2021 her work has been shortlisted for the Sir John Hurt Art Prize and the Lady Petchey Sculpture Prize as part of The Holly Bush Emerging Woman Painter Prize.

Lufeianna cites influences in both her life and art as one and the same; often leading thinkers in wellbeing, philosophy and psychology such as Sam Harris, Yuval Harari, David Whyte and Gabor Maté. She finds admiration in the works of other female artists who have faced adversity, including Tracey Emin, Yayoi Kusama, Paula Rego and Marina Abramović.

Her work currently employs materials and forms that embody contrasts, whilst playing on ideas of layering, complexity, symmetry and synergy. Rather than conveying a message, she instead works autobiographically in an attempt to challenge her own conflicts, conditioning and contradictions. Whilst initially destructive and painful, the process is grounded in ideas of acceptance and tranquility.