Yu-Whuan Wang, a New York and Kyoto-based artist born in Taiwan, has exhibited at galleries and museums in Japan and the U.S., as well as with a variety of outdoor exhibitions and public art projects, such as at the Kyoto, Uji, and Queens Botanical Gardens, and for The Global Warming Prevention in Kyoto Convention celebration. In 2021, she created a month- long project throughout northern Central Park, sponsored by the New York City Artist Corps, involving daily installations, workshops, and demonstrations.
Yu-Whuan’s shows in the U.S. have included the New York Historical Society, Taller Boricua Gallery and Pleiades Gallery in New York, and the ArtReach Gallery in Portland, Oregon. She also has had group shows for the 2020 and 2022 Lunar New Years at Flushing Town Hall and a 2021 solo show at The Garage Art Center in Queens.
In Japan, Yu-Whuan’s work has been selected for exhibition in the Hira Museum, and included in the Osaka Sculptors Association’s Thirty Year Commemoration Exhibition in the Osaka Modern Art Museum. She was invited by The Ga-un Sculpture Group for a special guest solo exhibit in the Kyoto Art Museum, and had a two-artist solo show with Mori Shigeru at the Ando Tadao Architecture Ayabe City Plaza.
After serving as a design director in Taiwan, Yu-Whuan transitioned to studying contemporary painting and sculpture at Kyoto University of Education, also studying with Shimamoto Shozo, a pioneer of Gutai. She is a member of the Kyoto Sculptors Association, and her shows in Japan have included a 2017 Space31 Gallery pairing with Sadaharu Horio, another Gutai member.
Yu-Whuan’s sculpture “A Letter for Chirac” was the subject of a Kyoto television special report, artist interview, and studio visit, and she has received a “MURASAKI” award for the 47th Kyoto Exposition. She also has exhibited with the BIAMT / International Biennial of Miniature Arts Timisoara in Romania.
In 2003, Yu-Whuan founded PhilosophyBox in New York and continues as its director curating pop-up art events. most recently in Central Park for Fall 2023.
My work is a form of encounter. Each work is an experiment, a risk. Often going beyond the frame, often in relation to nature, I investigate cross- boundary dialogues between people, art, and the larger environments of nature and city. I frequently bring together ordinary man-made and natural materials (coin wrappers, straw, twigs, etc), working with materials particular to local surroundings and circumstances, revealing poetic characteristics and aspects of plasticity. I also often engage viewers out and about where we all live, with projects in city streets and parks, from East Harlem to Queens, from Central Park to Kyoto.
Outdoors or indoors, I give a lot of attention to context and environment. Attention guides my work, so that philosophical and social questions get the chance to become personal and dynamic, embedded in our lives not as interpretations but as the play of consciousness and the unconscious. Attention transforms my use of single elements, in that accumulations of single materials (such as napkins, or strips of masking tape) become elaborated works. Color itself is an element, not just an aesthetic choice, that expands my work. Blue, in particular, is an element of spirit that I often use.
I often work with the shaping of space, presence and absence, two dimensions viz. three dimensions, as well as with the dimension of time, immediacy and impermanence, and often with multiple media and interdisciplinary projects. An attitude of equality and fellowship pervades my work—a fellowship of people and nature, observer and observed, mind and materials. My projects have included participatory workshops, as well as collaborations with other artists, performers, and members of the public.
My practice in sculpture and installation art, painting and drawing, photography and video is to delve into the moment, our everyday moments as well as moments of crisis. I follow these moments beyond the immediate, activating contexts of agency and resilience. I dig into the particularities of these moments, working with their idiosyncrasies to unlock our frames of reference and to welcome complexity.