WANDA YU-YING HU

My work concerns the area of identity in relation to the body and architectural space.

Through photography, film and video, I use ‘light’ as a medium to generate unexpected effects and intense sensual experiences in my site-specific installations. By displacing and re-contextualising the architectural spaces of galleries, the installations challenge our conventional perception of spaces.

Making experimental documentaries is another process for me to explore the relationship between body / self and architectural space. Instead of directly documenting the physical environment, I approach it with a subjective view. My experience in a space, or of a place, is translated through the interweaving of the moving images and the soundtracks from field recording, which brings a new experience of space and time.

Making artwork is an ongoing self-understanding process for me. My intuition often dominates the process of making while the end result is fed back into the self-analytical cycle. Being Chinese, living in London, I focus on the differences between Eastern and Western culture. However, rather than the binary poles, it is the ‘in-between’ and ‘overlapping’ that interests me and occurs across the whole range of my work in different forms.

2006
The Cycle of Celebrations- Mapping Chinese New Year’s Eve Dinner
The Nunnery Gallery, London, U.K.

After having lived in the West for years, I made this work to look straight at my Chinese identity. It is to map the landscape of transnational Chinese cultural identity through the use of digital technology. People of Chinese descent in different corners of the world are invited to use digital devices to document their dinners on Chinese New Year’s Eve. It explores how this traditional event varies in different parts of the world within the shared framework of Chinese culture, and how the young Chinese generation who are now living in a globalized world perceive this already transformed and diversified tradition. Via the Internet, the physical boundaries of geographically dispersed nations and time zones are fused. A contemporary landscape of Chinese identity is then mapped and shows the nature of the even as a cycle of celebrations crossing the boundaries of space and time.

2005
Reflecting
600 Images/ 60 Artists/ 6 Curators/ 6 Cities
Great Eastern Hotel, London, U.K.
Gallery F-Stop @ Tamarind Café, Bangkok, Thailand
Prenzlauerberg Museum, Berlin, Germany
The Brewer, LA, USA
Lumiere, Manila, Philippines
albb Gallery, Saigon, Vietnam

Through the use of a mirror and shop windows, layers of images from different viewpoints are overlapped into one. Various spaces and codes of cultural references are thus merged and transformed into new meanings. The indirect way of looking at the urban fabric of London reflects the diversity of this cosmopolitan city at this contemporary and ephemeral moment.

2004
Inside/ Out
Joint exhibition with Nora Maycock
Galway Art Centre, Galway, Ireland

The video installations displace and re-contextualise the architectural space of the gallery. The work plays with the dichotomy of internal/ external perception as well as the notion of embodiment and boundaries. It explores the relationship between the inside/ outside polarity of the body and self.

‘The culmination of Inside/ Out, a joint exhibition by Nora Maycock and Wanda Yu-Ying Hu at the Arts Centre, features two understated but remarkably effective video installations by the latter. (…) The engagement with the immediate architectural surround is particularly notable here and in Yu-Ying Hu’s video pieces, one of which alludes to the way we instinctively look to an outside from a contained space, and the other, a small coup-de-théâtre, that plays ingeniously with our sense of touch and our perceptions of depth and scale by confronting us with a moving image of a living membrane. Surprise plays an important part here and too full a description would undo that, nut suffice to say that Skin is a terrific work, really worth seeing.’
(Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, 16th July 2004)

2003
‘Should I reveal what the differences are?’
MA Fine Art Degree Show
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, London, U.K.

This work deals with the differences between Eastern and Western culture. The exhibition space is dealt as a conceptual body/ self. By positioning the light sources (as a medium to reveal ‘real and illusion’) outside and within the space (body/ self), the outside world (Western) and the inside world (Eastern) are implied. The viewer’s movement and experience of the space – passing-by and looking-into the spaces, strengthen the act of revealing.

2000
Liquid Light
Flesh and Vision
Forum da Maia, Maia, Portugal

This work is a series of colour photograms inspired by biomedical imagery. Through photogram techniques, the minute details of materials in daily use are traced in one to one scale and being microscopic. The unpredictable combinations of colours and differing chemical behaviour of viscous and liquid matter, result in familiar yet intriguing and unexpected images. These ‘living geometries’ are the abstract expressions of a continuous process of experimentation that both fuse qualities of ambiguous transparency and liquid depth.

1998
Imaginary Space
Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, London, U.K.

This performance intends to challenge our perception of two-dimensional drawing and to create an imaginary three-dimensional space. By performing behind a paper screen, my shadow is overlapped with the back-projected images of my imaginary space drawn with Chinese ink. Reading my poem with Indian music, eating, drawing, meditating, playing music… I was there inside my drawing, my imaginary space.

Education

2003
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London
London, U.K.
Master’s degree in Fine Art

1999
Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
London, U.K.
Master’s degree in Architectural Design

1995
Tunghai University
Taichung, Taiwan
Bachelor’s degree in Architecture


Selected Group Exhibitions

2006
The Cycle of Celebrations- Mapping Chinese New Year’s Eve Dinner
The Nunnery Gallery, London, U.K.

2005
90 Second Challenge: Viewing Architecture Through a Lens
Screening of video “Station”
Watershed, Bristol, U.K.
(http://www.dshed.net/90secondchallenge)
600 Images/ 60 Artists/ 6 Curators/ 6 Cities
Great Eastern Hotel, London, U.K.
Gallery F-Stop @ Tamarind Café, Bangkok, Thailand
Prenzlauerberg Museum, Berlin, Germany
The Brewer, LA, USA
Lumiere, Manila, Philippines
albb Gallery, Saigon, Vietnam

2004
En Route
Gallery Dream, Seoul, South Korea
Inside/ Out
Joint exhibition with Nora Maycock
Galway Art Centre, Galway, Ireland
Local
Franchise Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
Central Saint Martins on Tour
Hendre Hall, Tall-y-bond, Wales, U.K.

2003
Xhibit '03
The London Institute Gallery, London, U.K.
Touch and Go: 60 Oblique Notations on Encroaching Terror
Space 44, London, U.K.
Pinch Punch: 60 Oblique Notations on Encroaching Terror
Screening of video “ I remember”
The Cobden Club, London, U.K.

2000
Flesh and Vision
Forum da Maia, Maia, Portugal

Bibliography

PAD SCHEME
PAD Scheme (Professional Artist Development) catalogue, Chinese Arts Centre, U.K., 2006

The Irish Times, 16th July 2004
Review by Aidan Dunne of Galway Art Festival 2004

XHIBIT '03
Exhibition catalogue, The London Institute (former University of the Arts London), U.K., 2003

Margens e Confluências
Work featured in article ‘O Desenho na Era Digital: Rupturas e Continuidades’ by Silvia Simões, ESAP/Guimaraes, Portugal, 2002

Flesh and Vision – Six Architectural Experiments
Exhibition catalogue, Forum da Maia, Portugal, 2000, Caroline Stevenson and Cliodhna Murphy
London United Kingdom