Cici Wu is an artist who creates complex, sensory and dreamlike investigations into our cultural and material environment using drawing, video, sculpture, writing and installation. Combining historical research and material experimentation with an acute sensitivity to sociopolitical structures, Wu’s works aim to explore and interrupt dominant narratives on a multitude of subjects, including memory, cinematic history, nationalism, belonging and identity, and interpersonal relationships between humans and non-humans.
She has had solo exhibitions at 47 Canal, New York (2021, 2018); Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2023, 2019); a collaborative exhibition at Hordaland Kunstsenter, Norway (2023); and has participated in group exhibitions at the Drawing Center, New York (2023), CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2022), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea (2021), Para Site, Hong Kong (2020, 2018), Artists Space, New York (2020), Triangle Arts Association (2016), among others. She has participated in the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021).
From 2015 to 2021, she worked at non-profit library, archive and research platform Asia Art Archive in America where she assisted digital archiving project Joan Lebold Cohen Archive and spearheaded Betsy Damon Archive: Keepers of the Waters. Both collections of material bring to light under-examined narrative in the history of recent Chinese art and include rare documents about performance art and environmental activism in Chengdu and Lhasa in the mid-1990s.