For Yu-Wen Wu, mapping is an emotion; it is labor, excavation, a walk with memory, conviction and longing. Since I met the artist at a friend’s house in November, I’ve been thinking about how best to illustrate her great significance in this city — her journey, artistic approach, unique material vocabulary and impressive resistance to categorization. After a lot of thought, I realized that what generates the most meaning for me — the red thread that connects the work — is this relationship to mapping. This idea that mapping is about so much more than geography or distance or growth or even spans of time.
Yu-Wen Wu moved to the United States from Taiwan when she was six years old, and her art explores, on its deepest level, the immigrant experience. How is a young girl’s sense of self impacted by moving to a new country and leaving the old one behind? What are the long term effects of assimilation, displacement, feelings of invisibility? How can one hold on to one’s birth culture while navigating a new culture that is at first foreign and then quickly dominant, as in hegemonic, as in, this is the way you must act, speak, move, look and think, or else? Questions like this rang out from the audience following a talk at Harvard to celebrate Wu’s piece “Walking to Taipei” included in the “Journeys” exhibit on view through June 2, 2024 at the Harvard Art Museums. Again and again, people took the opportunity to describe the way Wu’s art spoke to their own complicated feelings about being an immigrant or from an immigrant family...
