Sculpture (MA)
Di Wu
Born in Chongqing, China in 1996
09/2014-06/2018: University of California, Irvine, U.S.
Course: Art (BA)
09/2018-07/2020: Royal College of Art, U.K.
Course: Sculpture (MA)
Contact
I have never been such a person who is not good at defining myself and works. Compared with the strong directivity of some artists, I always like to blur the content because I hope that people from different educational backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds, different genders, different races and different age groups are able to use their own ways of thinking and experiences to make their own unique interpretations.
In the process of my artistic creations, I usually start from my personal experience. I want the audience to consider my ideas through my information transmission, combined with their personal experiences or some social phenomena. I like to draw inspiration from my personal life because I think the meaning of life is the experience of life, and what I share with other audiences is that we are all human beings, and we are all alive.
Nevertheless, when life comes to 2020, it does not start well. A series of works I created during this period hope to closely stick to the current topics as a guide. After experiencing this epidemic, our thoughts, attitudes and cognition will change a lot. Pain will come but life will continue.
Then, I began to think about adding matches to my works and how to keep the process of burning matches. I have long wanted to use raw eggs as a kind of chaotic but life symbolic object as the carrier of my works. Thus, I decided to make a combination of eggs and matches. I cut off the head of the match and stick it on the surface of the egg one by one. When I lit it up, the heatwave touched me and my heart was fired up. Is the raw egg that experiences burning raw or cooked? After the fire broke out, there was only darkness left. I would like to explore what was left in the centre of the egg. It just seems contradictory of myself, an individual born under the collision of Eastern and Western cultural sparks. How can I solve the inner chaos and eventually find inner peace?
Medium:
Egg, MatchesSize:
Video, 49 seconds![[untitled]](https://res.cloudinary.com/rca2020/image/upload/w_1920,f_auto,q_auto/v1594242217/gatsby-cloudinary/5f0243e8ff2b444e5fe27397-983006-resize-1920-2560)
![[untitled]](https://res.cloudinary.com/rca2020/image/upload/w_1920,f_auto,q_auto/v1594242218/gatsby-cloudinary/5f0243e8ff2b444e5fe27397-989533-resize-1920-2560)
![[untitled]](https://res.cloudinary.com/rca2020/image/upload/w_1920,f_auto,q_auto/v1594242218/gatsby-cloudinary/5f0243e8ff2b444e5fe27397-50011-resize-1920-2560)
![[untitled]](https://res.cloudinary.com/rca2020/image/upload/w_1920,f_auto,q_auto/v1594242217/gatsby-cloudinary/5f0243e8ff2b444e5fe27397-58659-resize-1920-2560)
![[untitled]](https://res.cloudinary.com/rca2020/image/upload/w_1920,f_auto,q_auto/v1594242217/gatsby-cloudinary/5f0243e8ff2b444e5fe27397-68896-resize-1920-2560)
I still chose match as the relevant material, but I did not use it to burn. I collected the matches after smoking, that is, the little sticks after burning. I stored them in the ashes I collected in an ashtray. After burning, the charred sticks mixed with ashes were very dirty and full of scars. It is easy to remind people of the ruins after the war, the light of fire and the smoke of gunpowder. What we are experiencing now is a war, an invisible war. In addition, these wood sticks inserted in the mask are hard to touch. Just like the feeling of a thorn, people will instinctively have a distance to it. The aim is to think about the social distance policy issued by the government. At the same time, I also want the audience to reexamine the impact of masks on our lives because the role of masks in most people's minds has changed dramatically in this disaster. At the end of the epidemic, what should we think of people wearing masks, and their inner fear of viruses and the sense of distance between people?