Works

"Gracefully, they delicately tread upon the scattered shards."

Yih-han WU’s works are renowned for their unique, bold yet highly restrained artistic style. The focal point of her creations delves into a timeless yet persisting issue—being born a woman, with a particular emphasis on the "female body." In a society where private life can spark political issues, the female body remains a contentious and taboo topic, often becoming the subject and symbol of male power, do-minance, and conquest. The 20th century marked a period of struggle for women's liberation concerning their bodies, from the 1928 women's suffrage movement in the UK to the 1975 abortion rights. Although the 1970s seemed to signify victories for the feminist movement, the war is far from over in the 21st century. As a female artist, Yih-han WU continues the fight for gender issues through her work, from the 2013 "Little Adults Series" to the 2022 solo exhibition "Your Body Shouldn't Be Your Portrait," persistently using art to voice gender-related concerns.

The current exhibition is titled "Gracefully, they delicately tread upon the scattered fragments.", Excerpted from “The Goddess Buffet” by Zhiyu LIU, which speaks of the aftershocks of the trauma of the gender war, with shockwaves echoing among the affected women, all of whom bear internal injuries, except Yih-han changed the matter from not only “she” to “them”, where she believes equality exists not only on gender issues, but extending it to “everyone” . During this time’s exhibition, Yih-han WU uses watercolours as the medium while appropriating Western traditional painting. Within employment of simple colours, light, blurred, and flowing ink on paper with watercolours, replacing clear and heavy murals or oil paints, creating a unique sense of lines and atmosphere. Personalized brushstrokes, fluid yet intense lines, and traces left by varying tensions between pigments and water demonstrates freedom and spontaneity. In her works, she selects ele-ments from Western classical paintings related to female legends and stories from the Bible, isolating them from their original complex compositions. These elements are placed on the mysterious blank paper, seemingly like a cutout, creating new layouts and spatial relationships. This approach enhances the expressive elements and possibilities of materials while reducing the explanatory nature of the images, blocking text and narrative to emphasize the sen-sual aesthetic and eliminate erotic elements. This process can be seen as a "displacement" of time and space, reimagining the most alluring and controversial female bodies in history. Yih-han WU narrates stories of women being coveted, violated, accused, punished, enduring the pain of childbirth due to original sin, and embodying the radiance of motherhood. She highlights the idea that women should not feel guilty or anxious because of their bodies and challenges the notion that women can be more than just "women" and come in various forms. Successfully using 21st-century contemporary art methods to address the challenge of "how to represent them," Yih-han WU has paved a new path.

In her works, we see that the message extends beyond limiting women; fundamentally, no one should feel guilty, oppressed, or anxious for not "meeting standards." After all, precious souls reside within bodies, and the function of art lies in expressing or stirring these souls—the deep root of the soul; the common language of the diverse worlds beyond written words.

AKI Gallery