Igigo Wu

Self Portrait (2024)
Digital printing, limited edition
42 x 59.4 cm

Igigo Wu

Igigo Wu is a Zürich based, multi-disciplinary Taiwanese artist whose works include mainly paintings, drawings, photography, writing, and experimental film. Her research circulates around definitions of identity, aiming to reveal brutal qualities lying in the nature of history, identity, and memory.

In the end of 2023, I moved to Switzerland and started my study at Zhdk. Rejection has always been a huge part of my life after I graduated from Taipei National University of the Arts. Rejections of the comfortable environment of my originalhabitat ad culture, rejections which I had to encountered during bureaucratic process, rejections from people when I tried my best to elaborate myself in a foreign language.
How peaceful a reality can be misunderstood as one sees the world through rosetinted glasses from distance. Peace is never a continuity, but a temporality to me, at least to me in Switzerland, an Ausländer, a foreigner. However I’m already familiar with the cunning gestures of stability from my identity. Taiwan, an island without its own name, an identity built on denial. We have so many names, but none of them can guarantee us an internationally recognised identity or even a future without potential invasion. With my diaspora to my homeland, I don’t even know for which part of this fictional community I am representing. Not knowing whether because of my paradoxically peaceful life in Switzerland as a Taiwanese, the military demonstration from the Chinese government, constantly shooting missiles across the airspace upon my country ,or the indifferent attitudes from the internationals. I sensed those rejections of my nationality everywhere. The world seemed to have closed every single door of possibility in front of my face, it not only about the rejection of institution nor about nationality, but the rejection of the larger violence from us to our own, possible future. In the end I can’t even tell, if there is an actual silhouette of my home I am searching for, or the rejection itself is the only justification I can fixate myself onto.

Republic of China
Province of China
Chinese Taipei
Formosa
Taiwan

In the Salon de Refusées, I am exhibiting a digital print from a series being rejected by my first application of scholarship in Zurich. My original plan was another larger piece of oil painting, which ironically has been changed due to my personal financial difficulty as a student not being able to afford the shipping fee. Does it also count as a sort of rejection from the reality? Maybe, but I actually found this process ironically entertaining, since life is never as easy as it seems to be. Anyway, I am wholeheartedly thankful to krautART ARTspace, who provides me with this opportunity to exhibit in Berlin for the first time, as well as accepting multiple alternations of my works. I guess, the opposite of rejection is never acceptance or any form of success, but the feelings of being understood.

– Igigo Wu