Lulu Shur-tzy Hou’s work comments on socio-economic issues in modern Taiwan, relating to gender, self-identity, marginalisation and cultural heritage. Hou received her Master of Fine Arts in Imaging Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1992. In the following two years after graduation, she furthered her artistic training at the Sculpture Department of Alfred University, New York and the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House. She quickly gained recognition in artistic circles following her return to Taiwan in 1994 and was awarded “Taipei Best Photographer of the Year” at the Taipei International Post-Industrial Art Festival in 1995.
Profoundly feminist, Hou’s earlier work touches on concerns relating to the exploitation of young women in southern Taiwan. Her multimedia documentary project Look Toward the Other Side: Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan sheds light on the lives of young foreign brides being sold to Taiwanese men. It was later exhibited as a series, with the first part exhibited as Border-crossing / Diaspora—Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan (I) (Tsinghua University Art Center, Hsinchu, 2005), Border-crossing/Cultural identities: The Song of the Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan (II) (Kao Yuan University, Kaohsiung, 2008) and Looking Toward the Other Side: Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan (III) (Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, 2009). The series features young, Pingtung-based foreign brides in Taiwan and their families who are left behind in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia. Hou recorded the brides’ voices so that they could act as narrators and prevent the othering of these already-marginalised women. Hou’s project sought to give these women a public platform to express their struggles with cultural differences and self-identity that underscore many of these transnational marriages, in the hope of raising awareness of this widespread issue in Taiwan.

Hou’s work expands beyond feminist concerns to broader Taiwanese social issues. Her exhibition Out of Place — A Trilogy on Kaohsiung Military Dependents’ Villages (Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 2017) focuses on the displacement and dispersion of Kaohsiung’s Zuoying and Fengshan military dependent’s villages. Huang Sun Quan, the curator of the exhibition claims Hou employs a “double-gaze” by overlaying subjective and objective viewpoints of the villages’ residents through juxtaposing negative and positive prints of the same image. This project reveals current social issues in Taiwan while also preserving the cultural heritage and history of these villages through documentary photography and local narratives. In her artist statement, Hou notes that this body of work is meant to convey the depressing emotions that come to mind when thinking of the villages’ “lost” better days.

Since 2004, Hou has taught at the National University of Kaohsiung as Associate Professor at the Department of Crafts and Creative Design. From the early 1990s onwards, she has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions internationally, including in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Japan. Her works are collected by private and public institutions such as the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Tokyo Metropolitan Photographic Art Museum and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.