Shameful Company

In Chinese Medicine, the soul is a delicate balance of Yin and Yang elements: Yin as the heavy, material ways we deal with desire, survival, and mortality; Yang as the light, ethereal ways we find creativity, insights, and higher purpose. Shame arises when the two cannot find congruence, when society’s binary expectations divorce our expressions, desires, and creative purpose. In Western culture, fluid forms of moving and being within a body are categorized and shamed as unnatural, disgusting, and diseased.

Pigments and fluids remain ever present and ambiguous, yet intentionally categorized and closeted; shameful in the company of our bodies: Bilirubin – a yellow, “by-product” of hemoglobin breakdown – tints fluids and membranes (urine, bile, feces, jaundice) that remind us of disgust and disorder. Pigments in soybean skins are deemed “unmarketable” and “damaged.” Emerging from the seed’s hilum – a “small scar marking its former place of attachment”– the dark pigments are responses to harsh conditions (viruses, cold temperatures).

Through figurative paintings and murals, Isabel Lu reframes contemporary issues of queerness, disorder, and disease through a Chinese medicine lens, exploring how binary categorization and diagnoses ultimately create incongruence in our bodies and souls that stagnate as shame.

Holding a Masters of Public Health in Dietetics from UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, Isabel Lu explores routes of medicine that echo and overlap. Through painting, practicing herbalism, and engaging with ancestry, Lu learns and unlearns rigid and binary concepts of health and medicine through Western and Eastern perspectives.