Using Photography and AI, Song Lu Renders the Everyday Uncanny

A red and ripe tomato wedges tightly between the door and the doorjamb, illuminated by a light source from the right. A perfectly round onion sits atop layers of pamphlets in a vaulted safe, its skin just beginning to unravel, a spotlight shining from above. These are some of the scenes in Song Lu’s 2018 photographic series, “Still Life,” depicting common food items in her home studio. They are oddly satisfying, framing the mundane as an aesthetic experience. She treats each object with a delicateness and curiosity rarely granted things so ordinary and ubiquitous, suggesting they contain more drama and character than we may think. What secrets might an onion hold?

Lu describes her attentiveness by referring to the way that “minute moments imprint on my retina, evoking a peculiar chemical reaction, compelling me to pay attention to these experiences.” This sensitivity is visible in her works, where viewers are invited to lean into the poetics of seemingly ordinary objects.

Indeed, Lu’s superpower seems to lie in noticing the distance between the mere appearance of things and their infinite, imaginative possibilities. In her 11-minute 2021 animation, Elephants Never Forget, Lu widens this distance as she reflects on her relationship with New York City through the device of a memory palace. Each marked by its own color, scenes alternate between majestic views of the city’s skyscrapers at sunrise and nightfall, joined by abstracted objects and signs of personal significance to the artist. We see a giant poppy seed bagel roll past a view of a partially submerged Manhattan, and Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel on display at MoMA, its wheel spinning and spinning. A silhouette shows Lady Liberty standing above a bathtub as it slowly overflows. These objects are emblematic of the city, yet in Lu’s quirky and unlikely scenarios, seem to portray something else.

Lu moved to New York to complete her studies at the School of Visual Arts just before the pandemic, and spent a significant length of her time in the city in lockdown. Perhaps owing to this, Lu’s New York, though glittering in the sun, exudes an intensified sense of loneliness and isolation that one so often finds in big cities. As she takes us on a walk along the memory palace she has built, she invites us to view it as she did—in a time of stillness, strangeness, and longing for more.

Over a series of emails, Lu shared with me that in 2022, she began experimenting with AI. At first, she wanted to visualize assumptions and imaginings that are often elusive and hard to grasp. In creating her “Snow Drawing” series, Lu found that when she prompted the AI program to generate an image of an artist, it tended to picture an older white man, revealing an inherent bias that our machines learned from us. She soon became interested in how neural network models average out large sets of data, and started incorporating this into her work, which has so often focused on her individual emotions and experiences. She continues to focus on making the abstract tangible and the distant intimate, now training her focus on the elusive beast that is artificial intelligence.