Jen Wu (b. 1977) is an American artist and curator living and working in Manchester and Salford. Her work explores the overlap between the social and the material, in an expanded field where sculpture becomes Event.

Reclaiming collective architectures of multiple liberatory potential, this has evolved over the last decade as an interrogation of ‘public’ – of governance versus autonomy in an increasingly determined and stratified realm.

Since 2012, she has been working towards the reconstruction of Salford’s Old Bank Theatre / Royal Liver Friendly Society building (demolished in 2014) as a long-term ‘industrial action’ entitled The [Salford] Wall. Amidst the regeneration of Salford’s historic Chapel Street, it is to rebuild part of a building and a material history– to resurrect an architectural emblem of Salford’s industrial heritage as a working monument and structure.  Guided by the spirit of collective endeavour – from acid house rave to the protests of the interwar years – it is to create from this an open architecture, a reclamation, a co-development, an uprising, by and as a community.

She was recently in Taipei as part of Taipei Contemporary Art Center’s Burning Issue Residency Programme, learning from the Sunflower Student Movement and Taiwan’s decades-long history of popular protest – the evolutionary forces underpinning a sensibility and Taiwan’s open, democratic state.  Current and recent group exhibitions include: Modern History vol. 1 (Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool 2015), Nomad in Times (Taipei Contemporary Art Center 2014-15), The Manchester Salon presents In A Flux (Warrington Museum & Art Gallery 2014-15), Islington Mill at the Black-E: Temporary Custodians Of… (for Liverpool Biennial 2014).

Previous large-scale event-works include NIGHTCLUB (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 2008) and Event Horizon for GSK Contemporary (Royal Academy of Arts, London 2008-09) –  ‘occupations’ harnessing institutional infrastructures to generate multiple ruptures of co-action and expression.

Jen was co-founder director of artist-run space temporarycontemporary (London, 2004-09) and is currently a member of Manchester bands Water and Devi collective.