bio

Bing Lu (Maggie) (b.1999) is a Chinese photographer currently based in New York City. She earned her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2022, and her MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in 2024.

Lu’s first long-term photographic series, Unconditional (2019–), documents encounters with strangers on the streets of Boston during the COVID-19 pandemic—a time when human connection was both deeply uncertain and profoundly essential. Through her intimate portraits, the series explores the quiet resilience of everyday people and the enduring need for empathy in moments of isolation.

After moving to New York City, Lu expanded her practice into analog photography and alternative processes, reinterpreting traditional methods through a contemporary lens. Her abstract series, tough (2023) and like this, like that, I'm starting to crack (2024) mark a significant turning point in her image-making. Exploring alternative ways of perceiving nature through abstraction and imagination, these works document a process of imaginative revision, an inquiry into how images shape, distort, and reconstruct our idea of reality in an age of constant visual information.

Lu’s photographs offer a sense of solitude and quietness among the ever-complex digital age. The ambiguity within those images once again raises the question — where do imagery align in the current culture of visual landscape, when much or little the image is able to reveal or conceal.

CV