Steven Luu: A Path to Healing & Transformation
Curated by Gloria (Jiaying) Dai
July 2024-May 2025
Steven Luu: A Path to Healing and Transformation explores art as a means of addressing and confronting trauma through the works of Steven Luu.
As an artist who was a medic and wounded veteran, Luu creates sculptural installations that deal with the traumatic experiences resulting from his childhood and numerous deployments in the Middle East. The artworks featured in this show, with an emphasis on seriality and repetition, infused with autobiographical meaning, aim to establish newborn and recognizable narrative potential that could transform loss and traumas into survival and rebirth.
Articulated by the motif and process of transformation, reinvention, and repurposing of materials, Luu’s works – employ everyday objects that accompanied him during his military service. Other materials, such as concrete and epoxy resin, are used to explore ways to express his inner voice. In his exploration of art through different mediums, Luu candidly speaks about the past, reveals his personal medical reality, and eventually offers the viewers access to healing with his life testimony.
Steven Luu
US Air Force, 1995-2016 | NVAM Artist Fellow 2024
Steven Luu
US Air Force (1995-2016)
My artwork is a vessel for my healing. During my childhood, unlike many other kids with beautiful and happy memories, I endured hardship, poverty under Communism, and the unforgiving sea during our escape from Vietnam. I was less than eight years old when I had to help push corpses of starved people off the boat to prevent contamination. And the theme of death continued traveling with me beyond my childhood. As a U.S. military medic, I provided lifesaving to fallen comrades and enemies in dangerous situations. All these tragic encounters made me struggle to understand why I am constantly surrounded by the theme of death.
The materials I used for my artworks include everyday objects that accompanied me while serving in the military and include industrial materials like concrete, and epoxy resin. Both resin and concrete start as either liquid or dry composite material that must be mixed to activate and transform into a rigid substance that forms an object. My artwork is aligned with geometric shapes that are fundamental to me because they give me a sense of order. The organized shapes allow me to resolve the stress and chaos of my trauma. The process of making art becomes the ritual of healing for me.