See also Scenes from Meat City: Photo Shoot
EXHIBITIONS
2001 Goldsmiths MA Degree Show, London
2002 Mirror Mirror: Video Art from the U.S. and Canada. 291 Gallery, London. Curator: Monica Biagioli.
2004 Mesmer. temporarycontemporary, London. Curator: Anthony Gross.
2005 Reassurance. SPACE, London and Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester. Curator: Yeu Lai Mo.
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Scenes from Meat City is an ongoing work. Performing myself as a character traversing a then-foreign London, it is composed of excerpts – narrative fragments from semi-staged encounters – presented on multiple monitors as part of a sculptural installation.
With little to visually distinguish my actions from those of the people around me, the vignettes comprising Scenes… attempt to occupy a space between ‘real life’ and its abstraction. As a result, these filmed ‘performances’ rely as much upon the codes and fictions of the surrounding people and places to produce the scenarios and outcomes as they do upon my insertions.
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“Jen Wu is a video performance and installation artist. Her often large and chaotic installations feature many simultaneous performance endurance video works in and amongst a setting of furniture, building materials and her own clothing. The prevalent sense is that of a fragmented real time document of unfixed identities.
In some video works Wu seems to play out a role of fashion model, presenting an ambivalent position of self-exploitation. In other works she merely documents parts of her life; sleeping, driving, sex and boredom are all presented in a tough, real-time format, allowing for glimpses of a persona but never a complete whole.
Although the works are tough and uncompromising in their lack of narrative satisfaction, the installations themselves are colourful and inclusive. The video works often read as video ‘painting’, broad brushstrokes of choreographed colours and loops, with some monitors presenting purely abstract images and lo fi textured patterns and symbols. The installations specifically engage with the viewer in the space, providing processional moments as well as areas of seating and comfort. The dense paraphernalia of furniture, vintage fur coats and fabrics have an air of turn of the century decadence, the boudoir. The building materials act as a stand-in for identity in progress/dismantled.
The aura of the social animal, the sexual libertine is forceful but compellingly at odds with the inaction and the traumatic document presented in the endurance video works. Whilst embracing the sense of the Self inhabiting the Social, Wu tears apart self worth and self-image, presenting herself often as fractured or merely blank.
Wu’s work intentionally takes for its starting point feminist performance art from the late seventies. She however goes further in her work by analysing the very notion of the Performance itself, dealing explicitly with the dichotomy of the Act, for a camera, versus the Real, the absolutely authentic. Wu does not want to ‘act’ she wants to ‘be’, but all behaviour and mediation of the self to others is inherently filtered through performance of manner and style. This difficult constant contradictory state is what Wu investigates in her challenging yet sensual works.
Jen Wu has shown in London and New York and graduated from the fine art MA in Goldsmiths College in 2001. She originally studied fine art at Harvard University under Joan Jonas, amongst others.
Wu’s background is that of the Taiwanese émigré family, growing up in a predominantly white American suburban setting. These formative years gave her a strong sense of the notion of the Other, and its exoticization, from an early age which has been a major influence in her work since.”
– text by Anthony Gross
Jen Wu 