Memory and place are intertwined in Anne Wu’s work. Her practice understands home on varying registers, bridging the emotional and physical distance between geographies and generations and reifying personal and familial experiences with longing and placemaking. Drawing on both first-person experience in New York’s Flushing Chinatown and family memories of China, Anne’s works understand artifacts of urban space -- balcony railings and concrete stoops, architectural ornament and discarded ephemera -- as mnemonic devices, which gesture toward the diasporic community as simultaneously stewards of memory and architects of the new.
Anne’s recent installation Once Forgotten, Twice Remembered contemplates loss, departure, and vacancy. Architectural forms reference the sterility of the gallery while endowing the space with artifacts of unseen life: phantom doorways, stairs, and balustrades hint at that which might exist and endure beyond our capacity for vision. By constructing an architecture of the ethereal Anne’s works act as monuments for that which we cannot see, and give form to the unarticulated emotion of that which passes by unannounced.
Anne Wu (b. 1991, New York, New York) received a BFA from Cornell University in 2013 and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2020, where she was awarded the Critical Practice Research Fellowship (2019) and the Fannie B. Pardee Prize for Excellence in Sculpture (2020). She was an Artist in Residence at Bruce High Quality Foundation University in 2015 and will be an Artist in Residence at the NARS Satellite Residency on Governors Island in Fall 2020. Her work has been exhibited in New York at Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, The New York Public Library, BHQFU, 67 Ludlow, and Public Address, among others.
