Luna Qiuwen Lyu

Luna Qiuwen Lyu is a jewelry designer and interactive installation artist who has exhibited internationally with presentations in Munich Jewellery Week, London Design Festival, the Hunt Museum, and beyond. She has earned quite a few first prize recognitions including with the Goldsmiths' Craftsmanship & Design Awards and is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, widely considered to be the finest art school in the world.

Ranging from conceptual jewelry to interactive installations which incorporate mechanical functions, the works of Luna Qiuwen Lyu often alter value systems. For example, in 4024, the jewelry installations are largely oversized and act as futuristic artifacts to be found in the case of humanity becoming shrunken individuals through technology in order to save resources. Encompassing a locket which depicts the artist as a distant memory to a giant pearl and ring, the viewer will find these cynical works of art as a moment of despair as predicting our future demise due to diminishing materials and environments. Another way Luna Qiuwen Lyu plays with concepts of worth structures would be how she examines our past in a physical and sound installation such as A Billion Solitary Universes. In this piece, a metallic vinyl record becomes constructed with relief carvings of the moon in the inner circle and earth satellite image on the back of the device. When this custom-made metallic vinyl record is set to a play, an ominous distortion of 20th century recordings becomes voiced, from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to President John F. Kennedy giving a speech. This designed performative sound installation becomes an instance of a ‘anti-memorial’. One which offers cynicism rather than pure condolence or instances of memory.

Subversion and institutional criticism are at the very basis of the conceptual approaches by Luna Qiuwen Lyu. She questions institutional structures such as sincerity in ecology by her jewelry work and fragility of mortality in her installation and sound work, by suggesting records of humanity are almost more valuable, and perhaps more meaningful, because they can traverse time, space, and conceptual notions, as opposed to the finite nature of human biology. This deep cynicism and post-structuralism offers interpretations as fragments of time, either as conceptual artifacts or sonic devices or mechanical manipulations of illusory perceptions.

The Height Effect (pictured above) is an interactive mechanical installation by Luna Qiuwen Lyu which reflects the irony of humanities desire to reach for the skies. She depicts the skyscraper as an indirect contemporary symbol to Icarus from Greek mythology. Her installation is an anti-monument of vanity, as when the audience places the installation ring on their finger and waves their hand, the apparatus reveals a distorted worm’s eye view of a city, diminishing our hopes, ideals, and unrealistic expectations. The installation is a lesson in humility and questions value systems based on unrealistic and illusory ideals placed on individuals, such as ascension of levels on a skyscraper as notions of privilege and prestige. 

A deeply critical artist, Luna Qiuwen Lyu deconstructs our systems of value and collective self-worth with her rich conceptual works in experimental artforms. She depicts a world consumed by vanity and self-delusions of grandeur, unable to reflect on collective self-criticism. Whether through notions of death, aspirations, exploration, or memory, she offers cynical fragments which alter our pre-conceived perceptions.

https://qiuwenlyu.com