Cover Cici Wu with her prototype lantern (Photo: Affa Chan / Tatler Asia)
Cici Wu with her prototype lantern (Photo: Affa Chan / Tatler Asia)
1 / 1
Ahead of her new exhibition at Empty Gallery, the multi-media artist takes Tatler to a place at once familiar and distant, caught between cultures and yearning for belonging
Tucked away in Grand Marine Center, an old industrial building on an unassuming street in Tin Wan, the vast exhibition space at Empty Gallery spans two floors and is purposefully plunged into pitch blackness. In direct contrast, the gallery’s fifth floor studio, reserved for artists to create in, is almost drowning in natural light. On a brutally hot July afternoon, sunlight poured into the room over a large wooden table cluttered with an assortment of objects: a vase full of minimally arranged yellow flowers; a wooden skeleton made of bamboo and wire, due to become a lantern; mounds of printed academic texts; and sheets of delicate bamboo paper stuck on to boards, a strip or two of film negatives, handwritten notes, and some curious doodles.
Among the visuals on the translucent paper, a cute doodle of a frog pre-leap stands out. “This is just a practice run,” says artist Cici Wu, giggling shyly about her fun motif choice. “It’s all about experimentation—I don’t know what the final result will be. I never think about the visual form first; for me, it’s always process-driven—the most interesting or inspiring thing is experimenting with forms through ideas.”
In case you missed it: Inspired by Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, Hong Kong’s first Grammy’s Press Play artist writes songs on body positivity and turns bathroom sounds into music
Above Cici Wu with her lantern prototype (Photo: Affa Chan / Tatler Asia)
Cici Wu with her lantern prototype (Photo: Affa Chan / Tatler Asia)
1 / 1
While Wu’s work isn’t typically amphibian-themed, it is cerebral in nature, heavily drawing from theory, history and philosophy. As is typical of her creative process, Wu has been scouring pages and pages of academic texts and archival materials on a wide variety of topics in preparation for her upcoming exhibition Belonging and Difference at Empty Gallery. The show will feature new iterations of drawings, film, and paper lantern sculptures and installations; Wu is particularly recognised for the latter two media, and was working on such pieces when Tatler visited her studio.
During her pre-production phase of research and ideation, she sketches out written ideas and themes: for this exhibition, seemingly disparate terms such as “anti-capitalist”, “anti-dictatorship”, “Animism” and “Buddhism” appear on a sheet of bamboo paper next to the frog doodle, surrounded by notes, including the question “Imagine new dimensions through dream?” Her art is fundamentally a medium through which she connects her thoughts, interests and questions. Like most of us trying to understand the state of world and the role we play in it, Wu has more questions than answers. “It’s coming out of my own observation of myself,” she says of her continuing existential quandary. “Who am I? Why am I the way I am? What does home mean and where is it?”
Wu is originally from Beijing but grew up in Hong Kong and went on to study for her MFA in New York; she has since lived between the latter two cities. Her art is fuelled by a yearning to belong, and to understand her place in the world: sentiments which were compounded after the political upheaval of 2019 and the advent of the pandemic. “I don’t think the vocabulary for describing the past few years exists yet, or it’s not fully developed. It’s a weird time.”
Despite the pandemic, she kept busy; she recently completed a collaborative exhibition, Tsaiyun (Rosy-Cloud) Bridge / Forget Each Other in the Rivers and Lakes, in Bergen, Norway. The work for her upcoming exhibition was conceived out of “processing [my] feelings, thoughts and questions around changes in the last couple of years”.
Wu began thinking about it in 2022 when she visited Hong Kong, and describes it as an extension of Lantern Strike (Strong Loneliness), her 2021 New York exhibition, which featured lanterns in shapes derived from popular folk symbols across Asian folklore, ranging from pagodas to rabbits to a lotus. They were hung from branches that stretched out from vases around the gallery. Specially programmed open-source digital cameras were embedded in some of the lanterns to record the shadows; the resulting videos looked like early abstract animations and were projected around the gallery.
Above Cici Wu practicing calligraphy on bamboo paper (Photo: Affa Chan / Tatler Asia)
Cici Wu practicing calligraphy on bamboo paper (Photo: Affa Chan / Tatler Asia)
1 / 1
The latest work explores Wu’s thoughts about paper lanterns being a form of precursor to cinema. Without light, she explains, cinema doesn’t exist; lanterns “carry” light and manipulate it and cause shadows, much as a camera does to form a moving image and shape perspective. Paper lanterns historically featured symbolism, text and imagery referencing mythology and folklore, and, like film, were used as a form of storytelling.
It isn’t the first time Wu has showcased her work at Empty Gallery. Her last solo exhibition, Unfinished Return, took place there in 2019, before the city’s social unrest broke out. The main work, Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon (2019), alluded to the infamous missing persons case of Yu Man Hon: the autistic child who crossed the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border into the mainland and disappeared on August 24, 2000. While the tragic case is still unresolved—Yu was never found—Wu’s film reimagines a fictional ending; she cast Taiwanese actor Jonathan Chang as an adult Yu, bringing him back to Hong Kong to retrieve his own memories of his disappearance.
“There is more interest in the work now,” Wu says of the film, describing its metaphor-like equivalence to the uncertainty of the local political situation. “It captures the imagination of Hongkongers more vividly.” The ambiguity and surreal narrative in the film allude to the uncertainty Yu must have felt, but also to larger themes such as diasporic identity and the future of the city. Shot in Hong Kong, the slightly blurred aesthetic of the footage showcases spaces through a nostalgic lens, conveying Wu’s profound love for the city. “I’ve always had a strong attachment to Hong Kong,” she says; and although she is aware of the changes, “my affection for it remains the same.”
1 / 1
In a way, Yu’s story and Wu’s film reflect Wu’s life experience and own evolving identity, and retroactively project her situation during the pandemic. But her artistic process in raising these questions and searching for answers allows her to find healing and repair the damage done over the past three years. The artist says she specifically wants to contextualise the framework of the Empty exhibition in terms of ideas of belonging and difference. “To talk about displacement or personal identity is a struggle. I find there are gaps—missing words—in describing the experiences. How can I acknowledge the lack of vocabulary to describe certain experiences in this time and in this situation?” She hopes that the exhibition will address some of these gaps.
Perhaps the exhibition—and Wu’s practice at large—alludes to her own relationship with the idea of belonging, tied to the three cities that have shaped her. Her own recent homecoming, back to Hong Kong, can be considered an unfinished return of sorts. As a city that constantly subjects itself to change, and at an even more accelerated pace over the past four years, Hong Kong forces people to reevaluate, redefine and renew their relationship to the city through confronting the uncertainty that characterises its current circumstances.
Wu is always hopeful; and it’s precisely in the unknown, in the lack of conclusion, that she finds excitement. It’s also the point of departure from which she approaches the creation of her work, which serves as a means to propose alternative solutions and possibilities. “There’s perhaps an unfinished finish,” says Wu of her work, with a slight smile. “I like that it’s undefined, and left with an imaginative openness.”
Aaina was the Arts and Culture Editor of Tatler Asia. A passion for history and all things visual led her in the pursuit of art history. With extensive experience in the art world working for a range of art institutions, she combined her passion and expertise in the form of art and culture journalism. Prior to Tatler, Aaina worked as a culture reporter for South China Morning Post and editor at the online art platform Cobo Social. Additionally, she has contributed to a variety of prestigious art publications including Art Review, The Art Newspaper, Ocula, Art Agenda, Artsy, Design Anthology, and Artomity. Follow her on Instagram.
