Yu-Wen Wu

Nunu Fine Art New York is pleased to present From Rock to Cloud, the first solo exhibition of Boston based artist Yu-Wen Wu with the gallery. The exhibition will explore the concept of cultural migration, interrogating how lineage and one’s sense of self transform over generations when borders and oceans are crossed. From Rock to Cloud showcases recent sculptural and installation work alongside a selection of works on paper.

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1958, Wu emigrated to the United States with her family as a young child, an experience that later became central to her work. Wu has situated her practice at the intersection of personal narrative and global discourse to question which traditions are adapted, compromised, or even lost in the movement of people and how the complexities of migration can be reflected in material.

Wu’s three-dimensional works use materials resonant in Taiwanese or other Asian cultures to embody moments from the artist’s memory and to address the transformation of identity inherent to the immigrant experience. Intentions is a large-scale representation of the mala beads used for Buddhist prayer, composed of tea and lotus leaves that are shaped into orbs, gilded and strung from the ceiling using red thread. Artifacts reinterprets scholars’ rocks, historically collected as tokens of study and microcosms of the natural world, with ceramic, wood, and found material. Each component has specific conceptual significance—tea leaves signify a daily social ritual, and red thread represents the family's bloodline—allowing the artist to examine cultural memory from her position within the diaspora.

Gold, representative of hopes for prosperity and success, can be seen as a throughline from Wu’s sculptures to her works on paper. Acculturation employs gilded tea and foraged plant material, collected from Taiwan, New England, and New York to construct a metaphor for inhabiting multiple cultures. Not all the leaves are gilded, just as not all experience the American Dream. Using gold ink and foil on paper to form mountain-like shapes, Accumulation of Dreams visualizes this same false promise of abundance. Serving as another connection between her various bodies of work is the artist’s long-standing practice of observing the natural world. The series of watercolor, graphite, and ink drawings included in Shifting Grounds collage together studies of plants, clouds, or stones, acting as reminders to embrace our surroundings and nurture the planet’s ephemeral resources.

Yu-Wen Wu erodes the boundaries of fine art and craft while bridging her ancestral and adoptive cultures of Taiwan and the United States. Her work creates a space to envision a world in defiance of borders and the displacement of bodies by economic and environmental factors, where multiple narratives exist simultaneously.

Yu-Wen Wu was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1958, and immigrated to the U.S. as a young child. An interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, science, social & cultural issues, and the natural world, her work includes large-scale drawing, sculpture, site-specific installation, video, and community engaged public art. Wu’s subjectivity as an immigrant is central to her art which examines issues of displacement, assimilation, and changing identity.

Wu has exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington D.C.; Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece; Center for Border Studies, Cucuta, Colombia; the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, MA; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA; SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM; Perlman Museum at Carleton College, Northfield, MN; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; and Amon Carter Museum Fort Worth, TX, among others.

Wu has received numerous grants and awards, including the recent 2026 Wagner Foundation Fellowship, the 2024 Trellis Stepping Stone Grant, and the 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize. Wu was the 2024 Artist in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and her work is held in public collections including the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; the Haslla Museum of Art, Gangneung, Korea; the Princeton Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; the Davis Museum of Art, Wellesley, MA; and the Boston Public Library, Boston, MA.

Her many public art commissions include Lantern Stories by the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, Terrain at the Chao Center of Harvard Business School and the Poetry of Reason at Tufts University Medford.