Border Consciousness and Artivist Aesthetics: Richard Lou’s Performance and Multimedia Artwork

This essay explores Richard Lou’s distinguished career as an artist, from his early work in San Diego/Tijuana in the 1980s to his current installation and performance pieces on topics such as hybrid identities, counter-storytelling, nationalism, and cultures of oppression. The diversity of his themes, coupled with the multiplicity of the artistic media he utilizes, points to the decisively unstable and overlapping identities he possesses as an artist yet firmly establishes the decolonizing and politically transformative mission of his uvre.