Yu-Wen Wu: From Rock to Cloud — Yu-Wen Wu

Nunu Fine Art New York is pleased to announce From Rock to Cloud, the first solo exhibition of Boston-based artist Yu-Wen Wu with the gallery. The exhibition will explore the concept of cultural migration, interrogating how lineage and one’s sense of self transform over generations when borders and oceans are crossed. From Rock to Cloud showcases recent sculptural and installation work alongside a selection of works on paper.

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1958, Wu emigrated to the United States with her family as a young child, an experience that later became central to her work. Wu has situated her practice at the intersection of personal narrative and global discourse to question which traditions are adapted, compromised, or even lost in the movement of people and how the complexities of migration can be reflected in material.

Wu’s three-dimensional works use materials resonant in Taiwanese or other Asian cultures to embody moments from the artist’s memory and to address the transformation of identity inherent to the immigrant experience. Intentions is a large-scale representation of the mala beads used for Buddhist prayer, composed of tea and lotus leaves that are shaped into orbs, gilded and strung from the ceiling using red thread. Artifacts reinterprets scholars’ rocks, historically collected as tokens of study and microcosms of the natural world, with ceramic, wood, and found material. Each component has specific conceptual significance—tea leaves signify a daily social ritual, and red thread represents the family's bloodline—allowing the artist to examine cultural memory from her position within the diaspora.

Gold, representative of hopes for prosperity and success, can be seen as a throughline from Wu’s sculptures to her works on paper. Acculturation employs gilded tea and foraged plant material, collected from Taiwan, New England, and New York to construct a metaphor for inhabiting multiple cultures. Not all the leaves are gilded, just as not all experience the American Dream. Using gold ink and foil on paper to form mountain-like shapes, Accumulation of Dreams visualizes this same false promise of abundance. Serving as another connection between her various bodies of work is the artist’s long-standing practice of observing the natural world. The series of watercolor, graphite, and ink drawings included in Rock to Cloud collage together studies of plants, clouds, or stones, acting as reminders to embrace our surroundings and nurture the planet’s ephemeral resources.

Yu-Wen Wu erodes the boundaries of fine art and craft while bridging her ancestral and adoptive cultures of Taiwan and the United States. Her work creates a space to envision a world in defiance of borders and the displacement of bodies by economic and environmental factors, where multiple narratives exist simultaneously.