Bio

Isabel Lu, MPH, RD, (she/they) is a Chinese American visual artist and health equity researcher born and raised in North Carolina. Isabel studied Western nutritional science as an undergraduate student at Cornell University and then public health and dietetics as a graduate Public Health student at UNC Chapel Hill. Isabel planned to pursue a PhD researching access to culturally-appropriate foods for Asian American populations, but ultimately decided to pursue the arts as a way to communicate and support community well-being. After graduating with a Masters of Public Health, Isabel became the 2022 Artist in Residence at Durham Art Guild where they developed a participatory body of work exploring identity through food and stories. Isabel is currently one of the 2023 Emerging Artists in Residence at Artspace in Raleigh where they are focused on using community-driven art to support the well-being of Asian American (AA) creatives and communities in North Carolina. Drawing from their identity as an asexual, gender-non-conforming Chinese American growing up in the South, Isabel explores and challenges socially accepted representations of ethnicity, sexuality, and gender through food, history, and relationships.

Artist Statement

Isabel’s work explores ethnic, sexual, and gender identity through food, history, and relationships. After learning from BIPOC food justice leaders, such as Robin Wall Kimmerer and Karen Washington, as well as Traditional Chinese Medicine practices, Isabel began to understand that our relationship to food, our environments, and our bodies was much more complex than Western scientific methods could capture and communicate. Isabel explores what can be considered ‘science’, ‘evidence’, and ‘truth’ by paralleling and contrasting these standards in Eastern and Western perspectives. Drawing from their identity as an asexual, gender-non-conforming Chinese American growing up in the South, Isabel uses color to express and challenge socially accepted representations of ethnicity, sexuality, and gender.

Currently, Isabel is developing a body of work, titled ‘Yíngyǎng’ that explores queer AA identity through food, specifically investigating intergenerational relationships and AA history. Yíngyǎng means ‘nutrition’ in Mandarin and sounds similar to the infamous Taoist concept of ‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, ‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’ are two opposing, but interdependent forces or energies. For instance, one should be consuming a balance of ‘warming’ and ‘cooling’ foods, experience both rest and activity, peace and stress. Through creating this work, Isabel finds themes of ‘push and pull’ present in many AA stories: food makes us feel shame and pride, responsibility and opportunity, beauty and cruelty. The purpose of these paintings is to reflect that dualism of the AA experience.  

Isabel co-develops paintings with AA individuals; inviting them into the studio have conversations about their identity and connections to food. Isabel works with these individuals to develop concepts that they both connect with. Isabel then photographs them in a way that tells their stories. Additionally, Isabel researches and paints foods used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practices and contrast those ideas against Western nutrition standards, gender norms, and cultural practices. The purpose of these paintings is to, not only document the diversity of experiences, identities, and histories of AA and our foods in North Carolina, but to capture the ways in which these foods interact with our identities and relationships.  

https://www.isabel-lu.com/