WU JIARU

As a former pupil of a mainland Chinese art academy, Wu underwent a systematic Soviet-style art training. This system emphasised painting as a technical skill, focusing on the form and structure of objects. It adheres to strict and uniform standards of realistic representation where the expression of emotions was deliberately avoided. Characterised by uniformity, rationality, collectivism, such training left a profound impact on the artist’s self-identity and aesthetic formation.

Wu’s new body of work is a precise effort to break free from the many limitations and boundaries imposed by that training system, unfolding new dimensions for her creativity. She believes that her works carry the historical imprint of socialist realism, a subject that has not been fully understood. After traveling and residing in different places, her ideological perspectives have gradually eased the grip of past drawing experiences. Wu seeks to actively retrace the historical impact of technology on creators/artists by reinvestigating the concept of “automatic drawing.” By such practice, she aims to initiate a process of “unlearning.”

The process of ‘unlearning’ cannot be done by simply employing a method to solve a particular problem. Before the appearance of computational devices, artists were the subjects of automatism. Their works were often seen as products of genius and innate talent, associated with mysticism and abstract expressionism. In response to the rise of artificial intelligence and the emergence of machine learning tools as AI agents, artists nowadays need to consider the subject of automatic drawing: is it humans or AI? The entanglement between humans and machines remains a recurring issue in the creative process.

The artist attempts to combine automatic drawing with installations and video works to explore the entanglement between humans as creative subjects and AI as agents. The paintings in exhibited in P1 were created by the artist in a state close to meditation, without presumptions on an overall structure or a particular final outcome. This results in relaxed visual structures with soft colours and a tight rhythm. The composition exudes a sense of emotional liberation, almost resembling a manifesto.

P2 is an extension of automatism from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional world, composed of a series of ready-made installations and moving images. Within her collection, the artist selects objects related to the concept of destruction, such as shattered glass from protests, banned cotton, damaged umbrellas, and counterfeit crowns of Miss Hong Kong, etc. Using these objects and overlapping moving images as brushstrokes, Wu reconstructs a poetic landscape within the space. Transitioning between dimensional realms, the artist employs automatic drawing as a medium, even a form of counter-control on the technological control in our time, to contemplate the relationship between human subjectivity and the subjectivity of technological objects.