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Yuming Lu is a Chinese-born queer artist whose work examines race, intimacy and desire within contemporary gay culture. Growing up in mainland China and relocating to London in 2023, Yuming draws from the experience of living between cultures, being both participant and outsider in Western queer spaces. He graduated in 2025 with an MA in Contemporary Photography Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins, where his thesis explored racial and body type hierarchies within the gay community.
Yuming’s practice is rooted in lived experience, speaking from the perspective that for queer people of colour, sex has rarely been safe and pleasure never pure. His ongoing Safe Sex series reclaims this space with large-scale sculptures made from van doors and car parts, transforming objects associated with hypermasculinity and mobility into sites of both confession and power.
Cars recur as potent symbols of desire and colonial aspiration. In his family background, owning a European or American brand car has long signified success. In diasporic queer life, he wants to question whether the partner could also become another aspirational object, an ideal shaped by colonial histories and global power structures.Yuming’s work confronts these fantasies directly, exposing how desire can be colonised. Working across sculpture, installation, photography and video, his practice turns personal narratives of hookups, relationships, and queer nightlife into unapologetically physical forms that demand visibility. Yuming gives voice to those who, like himself, are minorities within minorities, queer people of colour navigating predominantly white gay communities.
Yuming’s practice is rooted in lived experience, speaking from the perspective that for queer people of colour, sex has rarely been safe and pleasure never pure. His ongoing Safe Sex series reclaims this space with large-scale sculptures made from van doors and car parts, transforming objects associated with hypermasculinity and mobility into sites of both confession and power.
Cars recur as potent symbols of desire and colonial aspiration. In his family background, owning a European or American brand car has long signified success. In diasporic queer life, he wants to question whether the partner could also become another aspirational object, an ideal shaped by colonial histories and global power structures.Yuming’s work confronts these fantasies directly, exposing how desire can be colonised. Working across sculpture, installation, photography and video, his practice turns personal narratives of hookups, relationships, and queer nightlife into unapologetically physical forms that demand visibility. Yuming gives voice to those who, like himself, are minorities within minorities, queer people of colour navigating predominantly white gay communities.
Works for sale on auction:
Safe Sex 2
2025
Van door, vinyl, laser-cut stainless steel
160 x 120cm
Artist’s Starting Request: £ 1200
Is That What You Want
2025
Inkjet print on paper - Self Portrait Film Photographs (Negative soaked in sweat, saliva and semen, allowing stain like textures to emerge.)
Edition of 1
70 cm x 50 cm
Artist’s Starting Request: £ 450
Is a series of self-portrait film photographs. After shooting, the artist soaks the film negatives in his own sweat, saliva, and semen, allowing stain-like textures to emerge during development. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s idea that “dirt is matter out of place,” the work challenges the way queer sex, especially within a traditional Chinese upbringing, is still labelled as dirty. By merging body and image, it reclaims intimacy from shame and asks who decides what is “clean” and what is “unclean,” and what power and prejudice lie behind such definitions.
Overdrive
2025
Acrylic paint and marker pen on van doors, reflective tape, 3D print
210 x 180 cm
Artist’s Starting Request: £ 1300
Mega Crush
2025
Car seats, acrylic paint, metal
120 x 60 x 40 cm
Artist’s Starting Request: £ 900
