Yixuan Wu uses food based forms and domestic fragments to map memory loss and displacement
Yixuan Wu’s project siding with things brings together glassblowing, woodworking, painting, ceramics, and carefully chosen ready-made objects to build sculptural situations that feel close to home while quietly resisting certainty.
Working from everyday conditions that are both familiar and hard to hold onto, Yixuan Wu reconstructs vignettes of domestic life into physical substructures, arrangements where objects carry sensual charge, systems don’t fully align, and the uncanny can surface through small gestures.
At the center of the work is domesticity as an emotional field: restrained, elusive, and at times unsettling. Wu focuses on the psychological tension inside intimate spaces, especially where care, comfort, affirmation, and protection are expected to be stable. In her hands, that stability becomes questionable.
Things can appear to promise reassurance while performing differently, asking viewers to notice how quickly ordinary materials and household cues can shift between soothing and disquieting.
Recent works are informed by Yixuan Wu’s time as a caregiver for a family member. From this lived proximity to care, the project examines displacement through the recreation of questioned comforts, concentrating on sensory deprivation and the way memory loss can interrupt recognition.
The sculptures attend to the emotional texture of care, its repetitions, its negotiations, its small accommodations, while also tracing the frustrations that arise when familiar surroundings no longer reliably produce meaning.
To extend the multi-sensory potential of the work, Yixuan Wu employs and transforms food and related materials into semi-permeant, constructible forms. These material choices operate as signals for different sensory registers, including visual, tactile, olfactory, and proprioceptive experience.
In contemporary installation and sculpture, such strategies often function as a direct route to embodied response, bypassing pure interpretation and placing attention on how the body reads surfaces, temperature, permeability, and scent as carriers of memory.
Yixuan Wu’s arrangements are frequently inspired by therapeutic activities designed to compensate for memory loss. Recurring elements and motifs are pieced together in ways that recall environmental enhancements seen in senior care facilities, sites where objects are selected, padded, softened, simplified, or made repetitive to support daily orientation.
Within siding with things, those cues are reconfigured into scenes of mismatched recall, articulating disoriented moments when the world looks familiar but fails to resolve.
Based in New York, Yixuan Wu received an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and a BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been shown at venues including Yeh Art Gallery at St John’s University, Chashama, the Lenfest Center for the Arts, CICA Museum, and SOMArts Cultural Center.
She has also been an artist in residence at MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, High Desert Test Sites, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and NARS Foundation, continuing a practice that investigates fragmented recollection through layered, materially specific intricacy.
All images courtesy of Yixuan Wu
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