Mark Chu

Mark Bo Chu (born May 12, 1989) is an Australian 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] focusing on human subjects, streetscapes, and audience-submitted imagery.^[7][8][9] Chu's 2013 debut solo show exhibited specimens of his own dandruff^[10] and in 2019 he undertook the Q Bank Gallery Residency in Queenstown, Tasmania.^[11] In contributions to scientific research, Chu has co-authored papers in journals such as Nature (journal),^[12] Cognition (journal),^[13] the International Committee on Computational Linguistics Conference,^[14] the Association for Computing Machinery's Creativity and Cognition Conference,^[15] and the Association for Computational Linguistics. ^[16] In 2019 he graduated from the Santa Fe Institute's Complex Systems Summer School^[17] where he co-founded the aesthetics research collective Comp-syn^[18] who were 2021 European Commission STARTS Prize semifinalists.^[19] Chu is a past restaurant reviewer for The Age Good Food Guide.^[20] At thirteen years old he recorded as a piano soloist with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra^[21] 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.^[22] 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.^[23] 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.^[24] 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.^[25]

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.^[26]

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