This is Wu’s second show and first solo show with Latitude Gallery, a Tribeca-based gallery focused on highlighting emerging artists and AAPI voices in the arts. Walking up the stairs, the first thing a visitor may encounter is an excerpt of a Louise Glück poem on the wall, immediately to the right of the entrance. Invoking the constant recollection and re-imagination of childhood, Gluck writes of “silence and distance, distance of place, of time”. It was well-chosen for this show, which has processed all Wu’s memories equally through a textured, blue and lavender haze: those older and newer, those farther away in China and right here in Brooklyn.
A former Philosophy major, Wu seems to offer the intellectual counterpart to the saying “the body keeps the score”: that our constant reinterpretation of memory is, ironically, our only means of keeping it with us. What results is a show that seems to assert that change is as essential to returning as it is to moving forward. It feels analogous to me to a scientific paradox: the process of observing itself influences the result of one’s observation. The process of dredging up memories requires reinterpretation. I think of the James Baldwin quote from his novel Giovanni’s Room: “You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
Wu’s interest in Morandi, film, and the cool-toned filter distinctive to the blue windows of her childhood home in rural Southern China all converge in her work: carefully curated snapshots, accumulating both space and time as they construct scenes from Wu’s life.
