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 CommissionSTARTS 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]
^Srinivasa Desikan, Bhargav; Hull, Tasker; Nadler, Ethan; Guilbeault, Douglas; Abubakar Kar, Aabir; Chu, Mark; Lo Sardo, Donald Ruggiero (2020). "Comp-syn: Perceptually Grounded Word Embeddings with Color". Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. pp. 1744–1751. arXiv:2010.04292. doi:10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.154. S2CID222272026.
^Chu, Mark; Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan; Nadler, Ethan O.; Ruggiero Lo Sardo, D.; Darragh-Ford, Elise; Guilbeault, Douglas (20 April 2022). "Signal in Noise: Exploring Meaning Encoded in Random Character Sequences with Character-Aware Language Models". arXiv:2203.07911 [cs.CL].