Since exhibiting WU Chia Yun’s lightbox works Lonely Island (2017) in 2019, UP Gallery has continued to follow the trajectory of her artistic practice. Building on her method of retrieving images from her archives, WU has explored the act of “making” images with images—deconstructing and reconstructing visual space to disrupt or merge the individuality of her subjects, placing them in a suspended state across different times and places. Last year, multiple film works featured in her solo on the way home, shown in our second-floor screening room, revealed her acute sensitivity and expressive power in visual storytelling.

In recent years, WU has continually pushed her boundaries, relocating to New York to immerse herself in a broader international creative environment. Her recent work mother-land was selected as a laureate for the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents in partnership with LUMA Arles and the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP), and she will soon be participating in both the Taipei Biennial and the Taiwan Art Biennial—further testament to her compelling artistic presence.

This solo exhibition will bring together mother-land, A Journey without Body, and Did you See, tracing the artist’s ongoing exploration of the space between “snapshot and narrative,” “chance and experiment.” Guided by her preference not to intrude on others, WU’s photography has long focused on snapshots of family members and distant views. Since she began taking photographs, her archives have accumulated a wealth of purposeless images from different times and places. Through these fragments, she reflects on her position as a traveler from Taiwan—constantly questioning and gazing between the notions of home, nation, and the world. This unresolved state of inquiry has become her lifelong preoccupation.

mother-land speaks to freedom, belonging, and void—depicting an ineffable calm and emptiness. Through candid photographs of her parents, family, and landscapes, WU materializes fragments of stream-of-consciousness, attempting to deconstruct the nature of their fluidity and reconstruct a map of hope within fractured images. The series incorporates mixed media such as hand drawings, spray paint, and printmaking, using layering and empty shots to create a detached yet emotional atmosphere that probes the tension between freedom and confinement. Water emerges as a central motif, symbolizing both the isolation and unease of identity, as well as the sublime yet solitary condition of homeland.

A Journey without Body applies multi-layered printmaking technique for digital output, creating an overlapped and alienated dimensional space with texture of sketches. It depicts the drifts and unpredictable journey of a soul.

Did you See responds to the chance and disruptions inherent in snapshot photography: dust on the lens, a strand of hair across a face, a camera wrist strap. These small matters mark the photographer’s presence. The work intentionally reconstructs subjects obscured by such accidents, pairing them with subconscious-like monologues. When these invisible walls are breached, the images draw viewers into the gray zones of a multiverse, questioning the very nature of “existence.”