Carol Yinghua Lu is an art critic and curator, as well as a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Melbourne. She is a contributing editor at Frieze, is on the advisory board of The Exhibitionist, and was on the jury for the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale. She also served as co-artistic director of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale and co-curator of the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale in 2012. From 2012 to 2015, she was the artistic director and chief curator of OCAT Shenzhen and in 2013 she was the first visiting fellow in the Asia-Pacific Fellowship program at the Tate Research Centre.

In collaboration with the artist Liu Ding, she is in the process of researching the legacy of Socialist Realism in the practice and historical narrative of contemporary art in China. They have co-edited and co-authored Reef: A Prequel (Maastricht: Bonnefantenmuseum, 2016); Little Movements I: Self-Practices in Contemporary Art (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2011); Little Movements II: Self-Practices in Contemporary Art (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2013); Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World (Lingnan Art Publishing House, 2012); and Individual Experience: Conversations and Narratives of Contemporary Art Practice in China from 1989 to 2000 (Lingnan Art Publishing House, 2013).

At Bard Graduate Center, she will continue her research on examining the historical relevance of the formation of Socialist Realism to the discourse and judgment of contemporary art in China, focusing on the intellectual tradition in China since the 1940s. She will interview a number of historians of Chinese literature and Chinese philosophy based in America and will continue her writing on this project.