The Davis Museum is honored to present Yu-Wen Wu (b. Taipei, Taiwan), a Boston-based multi-media artist exploring themes of migration, displacement, and climate change, as the recipient of the first biennial Prilla Smith Brackett Award. Funded by Prilla Smith Brackett (Wellesley Class of 1964) and administered by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the award honors an outstanding woman visual artist based in the Greater Boston area, whose work and exhibition record demonstrate extraordinary artistic vision, talent, and skill. A graduate of Brown University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Wu has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. In Boston, she shows with the Miller Yezerski Gallery, and has exhibited her work at numerous local museums and galleries, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Danforth Art Museum, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons College, the Slater Gallery at Tufts University, and Boston City Hall.
This online exhibition presents a selection of Wu’s work in conjunction with excerpts from her artist’s statement.
“Human migration will be a defining issue of this century. Within the global community, record numbers of people are being displaced and crossing borders. This great number of refugees and migrations are the result of armed conflicts, human rights abuse and economic deprivation. People continue to cross borders and to relocate in search of safety and a decent life. Their fate depends on the policies that global leaders adopt. We are entering an unprecedented era of general crisis--migratory, environmental, social and political. How do we face these challenges as people working in the creative fields? How can art respond to these circumstances? What can art do? These are the questions I ask myself.”
“My lived experience as an immigrant from Taiwan is central to my artwork. As an artist, practicing in Boston, my projects are informed by my subjectivity as an Asian immigrant. The projects that I pursue operate at the crossroads of art, science, politics and cultural issues. The form the artworks take includes site-specific video installations, community engaged practices, interdisciplinary projects with scientists and large-scale drawings. Most recently I have been working with small groups of new immigrants who have entered the United States to create projects with and about them. These artworks function as acts of collective resistance. I have also found important meaning through producing public art. These projects have provided access to diverse audiences and have provoked dialogue.”
“My most recent ongoing project, Leavings/Belongings (2016 to current) gives voice to individual immigrants and refugees who make it to the United States. The artwork brings small groups of immigrants together to make symbolic bundles. These bundles represent or call attention to material objects and cultural ideas that individual immigrants were able to bring with them or were forced to leave behind. Embedded in these bundles are the narratives of crossing borders, strategies of surviving terror and violence, and the loss of family and home. Imbued within the bundles are also testimonies of hope and gratitude. These bundles become the foundation for multiple sculptural installations. A video of the immigrants’ narratives is currently in progress. This project becomes an archive of drift, loss, the search for a new life and home. To date, the project has produced bundles and stories from several locations throughout the United States.”
“Climate migration is a reality. Although the definition of who is a refugee has expanded, people who are forced to flee due to environmental change are still not offered legal protection as refugees. Large numbers of people are becoming environmentally displaced. They are forced to leave their home region due to sudden or long-term changes from droughts, desertification, sea level rises and extreme weather. My recent projects that speak to this issue include With/Out Water (2018), an outdoor video installation, consisting of 5 temporary shelters. Each shelter hosts a discreet video projection from within about extreme weather and its effects on populations.”
