Minglu Du

My Body, a Four-Winged Bear

My Body, a Four-Winged Bear (2026) is an installation that combines sculpture, projection, sound, looping voice-over, and Arduino-controlled blinking lights. Arduino-controlled blinking lights intermittently animate the fragmented cyborg remains, suggesting unstable states between consciousness, surveillance, malfunction, and death. It places fragmented cyborg remains in relation to the projected image of a four-winged bear. The work examines the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg in contemporary futurist visual culture, where East Asian-coded femininity is often aestheticized, fetishized, and made available for consumption. Rather than reproducing that familiar body as sleek or desirable, the installation presents it as broken, inert, and corpse-like.

The four-winged bear emerges through biomythography, drawing on personal memory and Hundun (混沌), a figure from Chinese mythology. By placing the bear in an absurd juxtaposition with the cyborg body, the work uses irrationality to expose the violence and absurdity embedded in dominant cyborg imagery, especially in the way it objectifies and turns marginalized bodies into consumable others.

Apollo and Daphne
Stop-motion animation, 2023 (edited 2025)
Clay, paper, flashlight

Apollo and Daphne is a clay-and-paper stop-motion animation that reinterprets the classical myth through the perspective of fear, coercion, and bodily vulnerability. Rather than presenting Apollo’s pursuit as romantic or divine, the work foregrounds the violence embedded within the act of pursuit itself. Daphne’s transformation is treated as an act of desperate self-protection, in which escape becomes possible only through self-erasure. Through tactile handmade materials, fragmented forms, and shifting flashlight illumination, the animation emphasizes the emotional and physical tension often obscured within canonical retellings of the myth. By slowing down a narrative long normalized within art history, the film invites viewers to reconsider the relationship between myth, power, resistance, and the representation of women’s bodies.

The Toad, The Tiger, The Bodhisattva
2024
Animated graphic novel

The Toad, The Tiger, The Bodhisattva is an ongoing animated graphic novel project that draws from childhood memory to explore class tension and domestic inequality. Through surreal imagery and metaphorical characters, the work examines the invisible boundaries that separate people from different social classes and shape relationships, perceptions, and power dynamics within shared spaces. Centered on the emotional experiences of its protagonists, the project reflects on the consequences of social division within the intimacy of family life. Rather than assigning blame, the work seeks to reveal the emotional and structural complexities that emerge when different social worlds collide within the same household.

The Toad, The Tiger, The Bodhisattva
2024
Digital animation still

This image is a still frame from The Toad, The Tiger, The Bodhisattva, an ongoing animated graphic novel project exploring childhood memory, class tension, and domestic inequality. The scene depicts the protagonist sitting on the ground with their knees pulled to their chest, immersed within an imagined psychological space shaped by the emotional pressure imposed by three supporting characters.

Shitopia
2026
Comic Book
 

Shitopia is an ongoing comic book project set within a surreal underground utopia where excrement inherits the memories, emotions, and characteristics of its human creators. The first issue follows the journey of a poop protagonist navigating a bizarre society designed for its residents. Through absurd humor, grotesque imagery, and speculative world-building, the project reflects on patriarchy, class struggle, and the persecution of gender and sexual minorities. Rather than presenting utopia as an idealized space, Shitopia examines the contradictions, traumas, and power structures that persist beneath fantasies of harmony. By combining satire with emotionally charged narrative elements, the comic invites readers to reconsider the unstable relationship between identity, social systems, and the desire for belonging.

Untitled (Editorial Illustration for On Prolonged Boyhood by Ivy Rockmore)
Editorial illustration, digital, 2025
Published in Post- Magazine, September 17, 2025

This digital editorial illustration was created for On Prolonged Boyhood by Ivy Rockmore, published in Post- Magazine on September 17, 2025. Drawing from the article’s recurring bird metaphor, the image reimagines emotionally stunted boys shaped under patriarchy as hybrid bird-human figures. Through surreal visual language and symbolic transformation, the work reflects on prolonged boyhood, emotional repression, and the fragility of masculinity within patriarchal social structures.

Untitled (Editorial Illustration for Decision Fatigue by Sasha Gordon)
Editorial illustration, digital, 2025
Published in The Brown Daily Herald, December 3, 2025

This digital editorial illustration was created for Decision Fatigue by Sasha Gordon, published in The Brown Daily Herald on December 3, 2025. The illustration depicts a hand pouring a bottle labeled “DECISIONEX,” from which human-shaped pills marked “TRUE ME” spill outward. Responding to the article’s reflections on narcolepsy-like exhaustion, medication, self-perception, and emotional fatigue, the image visualizes the desire to recover an imagined “ideal self” through pharmaceutical and psychological intervention.