WU WEI

Born in Zhengzhou, Henan, Wu Wei grew up in a province where the deep sediment of civilisational history collides violently with a backward and harsh present. He would have encountered, early on, the cruelty embedded in the old saying: when the skin is gone, what anchors the fur? The desolation of the Central Plains stretches across the horizon of his work, yet it functions as ground, never as frame. Through critical reflection, he has stripped away both the overuse of so-called “Oriental symbols” and the regionalism that wears the mask of fidelity but amounts to rigidity and regression.

Tactility—the living, palpable state of matter—was the urge that first drew him to art. The oversized cloth thumbs and the various paper pelages he created in response carry a warmth laced with strangeness, transmitting it to the viewer directly. As he grew more deliberate in contemplating the tension between the primitive and the civilized, identifying “how a primal, beastly force finds its place within civilization” as his central theme, ancient and folk mythologies became sources and reference frames for his visual vocabulary. But he never embarked on a nostalgic quest for totems, never assumed the role of “an artist from ten thousand years ago.” Instead, through everyday perception and our already disciplined bodily senses, he conjures the visages of imagined beasts, still “holding onto the joy of incompletion”—a presence at once unmoored and necessary within this time and space.

In the “Section and Substitute” and “Skin Narrative” series, he reworks bodies drawn from Western and Chinese classical image histories, embedding wounds, pelage, and metal parts within them. He strips these carriers of their original religious vectors to expose the vulnerability of flesh, the dual pain of the physiological and the psychological, and the nature and energy that modernity threatens to destroy. As Walter Benjamin observed, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” What Wu Wei pursues here is not a postmodernist deconstruction, but the disclosure of our civilization and collective fate as a body to be shaped.

The Pelage series on canvas continues. In recent years, his practice has moved away from a strong biomimetic impulse; influenced by abstract painting, it has shifted “from narrative function toward pure perception and formal expression.” In addition, the Wild Things series in this exhibition—metal chairs scattered throughout the space and entangled with pelage—are not in a state of subjective overlay. Instead, they present a suspenseful bidirectional dynamic: these wild things may have invaded from the natural world, or they may have found conditions for autonomous growth within the human environment. The spatial atmosphere is stagnant, edged with a nightmarish quality. Years ago, when we were isolated from one another, each of us seemed to have stood alone in such a space. Perhaps this can be read as Wu Wei’s renewed question of the primal force.

Text by Zhu Zhu June, 2026