Zen WU

Lives and works in France

Artist statement

My work begins with things that are easy to overlook: a taste, a gesture, an image, an object, or a familiar situation. I am interested in the moment when these seemingly ordinary details begin to reveal histories much larger than themselves. A flavor, for example, may carry traces of climate, agriculture, migration, trade, preservation techniques, family habits, and political or economic change. A repeated gesture can hold a form of knowledge whose origin is no longer visible. An image may survive long after the event, object, or place that produced it has disappeared. I work across painting, performance, installation, photography, and video. Rather than using these media to document a subject directly, I use them to test how memory and history are transformed when they pass through the body, material, and image. Painting allows different times and places to become compressed into a single surface; performance makes weight, repetition, breath, waiting, and transmission physically perceptible; installation lets these relations unfold in space and between people. My recent work increasingly moves between individual experience and collective situations. I am interested in what remains after something has disappeared: how a place persists in a taste, how history settles into a gesture, how an absent object can still organize a body, and how images continue to change after the reality they once referred to is gone. For me, art is a way of following these traces until the...

Artwork