Mark Chu

Mark Bo Chu (born May 12, 1989) is an Australian multidisciplinary artist, writer and complexity scientist. His public murals are shown in Atlantic City[1][2][3] and Melbourne,[4] and he has held painting exhibitions in Melbourne, Shanghai[5] and New York,[6] often focusing on the human figure and streetscapes.[7][8] Chu's 2013 debut solo show exhibited specimens of his own dandruff[9] and in 2019 he undertook the Q Bank Gallery Residency in Queenstown, Tasmania.[10] In contributions to scientific research, Chu has co-authored papers in Elsevier's Cognition (journal),[11] the International Committee on Computational Linguistics Conference,[12] the Association for Computing Machinery's Creativity and Cognition Conference,[13] and the Association for Computational Linguistics. [14] In 2019 he graduated from the Santa Fe Institute's Complex Systems Summer School[15] where he co-founded the aesthetics research collective Comp-syn[16] who were 2021 European Commission STARTS Prize semifinalists.[17] Chu is a past restaurant reviewer for The Age Good Food Guide.[18] At thirteen years old he recorded as a piano soloist with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra[19] and was a 2005 keyboard finalist in the ABC Young Performers Awards. He is a fiction graduate of Columbia University's MFA and past winner of the engineering school's interdisciplinary design challenge.[20] Chu's 2021 concept sculpture "The Giving Ox" was intentionally fixed at a price of zero dollars, with the owner instructed to live as generously as possible until passing on the work for the fixed price.[21] Chu was a recipient of the MH Carnegie NFT Fellowship, through which he exhibited crime theory collectibles Crypto Crimz at the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair.[22] In 2022, for a candid portrait of his partner author Nell Pierce, Chu received a Highly Commended prize for the Art Gallery of Western Australia's Lester Prize, one of Australia's richest portrait prizes.[23]

Mark Chu is the son of Chinese-Australia composer Chu Wanghua, and grandson of Chinese scholar and dissident Chu Anping. He lives in Melbourne with his partner Nell Pierce, and their daughter Mo.[24]