Ruo-Hsin Wu is a London-based Taiwanese visual artist who focuses on painting, drawing, and handmade animation. She holds a BA in Animation from Taipei National University of the Arts and a MA in Visual Communication from Royal College of Art. Her paintings are dreamy yet bittersweet, fluctuating between innocence and grotesque. The innocent appearance of her work has often packaged uncomfortable feelings and potential threats. In her solo exhibition ‘Transitional Object’ in Taiwan in 2019, she connects her drawing process to the notion of transitional objects. In psychology, a transitional object is a soft, huggable item that offers comfort and security to a child during a transitional phase － just like how the artist projects her feelings onto each piece of work to adapt to changing realities and mental states.
With her background in animation, Wu believes in the power of storytelling to create meaning and make an impact in our lives. Through narrative image-making, she explores the subjects she is deeply concerned about, including the relationship between humans, nature, and other species. In her recent acrylic paintings, she painted the animals from her childhood nightmare, involving death, compassion and sadness. Her work is usually driven by her personal experience, dealing with time, space, and memory, especially her childhood. Each piece of her work is a non-linear story made of fragments from the world around her. To create empathetic communication, she has developed an ambiguous narrative form, dealing with the junction between individual and collective memory. She is fascinated with how the meaning of a work can develop within the viewer in a state of perpetual growth and extension.
