Sara Wu
About
Sara Wu (b. 1994 in Taiwan) works in Taipei and London. Her artistic practices encompass photography, sculpture, and installation. In her art, she often suspends the surfaces of overlooked, mundane events which are inspired by observations on and identifications of existing daily experiences, and the annotation of its re-experience.
Her works have received awards from Parallel Photo Platform and Wonder Foto Day, and have been exhibited in the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Centre in Budapest, the Grosvenor Gallery in Manchester, and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. She has participated in a residency programme sponsored by the University of Bolton at Neo Studio in 2019.
Statement
Developing her ideas from photography, Wu believes the forms displayed in images are no longer merely representations of the physical world, but a new two-dimensional state of vision—a collection of sensations waiting to be noticed. By re-examining the images and noticing its essential qualities, a further visual experience can be born.
After working with photography for years, she has been able to research the physical world in an objectified way and has gained insights into the overlooked objects and spaces of daily life. In recent years, she has mainly worked with found objects whose interpretations have mostly been discarded. The objects presented in her work live in a state of instability and uncertainty, emphasising their form of existence by detaching the objects from the system in which they are usually embedded.
Lived absence of objects
Objects are constructed together as part of a system which enables them to enter our daily events and govern our interactions with the world. In this system, objects themselves need to refer to others by endowing one another with abstractness while their identities are replaced.
Due to the present time order based on totality, fragmentation, and transparency, things are being increasingly objective and interdependent. Instead of responding to each other mutually, as a result, object and subject tend to build their relationships through communication.
In this work, I try to produce the sense that all things exist in between each other as responses to the phenomenon that things are being progressively interdependent. Through suspending and recomposing the surfaces of everyday living spaces, I attempt to extend the relationship among those objects by presenting their tensions—between folding and unfolding, found and made, absence and presence, object and subject.
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This series includes the work 'Framing the Ordinary', Connections and its Extension' and 'Unfolding a Plain of Remnant.'
Framing the Ordinary
Medium: Found objects, concrete, wood, white mesh, tiles, paint
Size: dimensions variable
Connection and its Extension
Medium: Found objects, concrete, wood, white mesh, tiles, paint, stones, metal, glass, sand, blocks, marble
Size: dimensions variable
Unfolding a Plain of Remnant
“The enigma, though, lies in their bond, in what is between them. The enigma consists in the fact that I see things, each one in its place, precisely because they eclipse one another, and that they are rivals before my sight precisely because each one is in its own place—in their exteriority, known through their envelopment, and their mutual dependence in their autonomy.”
-----Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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Medium: Found objects, wood, metal, glass
Size: dimensions variable