bioLingxiang Wu is a Chinese queer visual artist, researcher, graphic designer, and educator currently based in Toronto. Wu completed his BA degree double major in Studio Art - Photography and Media Studies at the University at Buffalo in 2015 and an MFA degree in Interdisciplinary Master's of Arts, Media, and Design at OCAD University in 2019. Wu experiments with various mediums such as photographic collage, video, animation, and installation to investigate the contemporary image culture. Wu is interested in topics of accumulation, smoothness, and hyperactivity/hypervisibility in contrast with the collective exhaustion under the influence of surveillance capitalism. Creating contemplative visual experiences to counter the ever more aggressive digital environment. His artwork has been exhibited in CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, Art Mur in Montreal, and various galleries in Toronto, including Xpace, SAVAC, and Whippersnapper Gallery.
aRTIST statementToday's digital communication platform performs like a giant meat market within the phantom of Neoliberal capitalism. Visual content is stripped naked to accelerate information exchange, thus stimulating instantaneous gratification of desire. Images become atmospheric yet hypervisible, creating gusts of wind embedded with bold-lettered messages, coming at us from all angles to sway our subjectivity. We entangle with our algorithmic reflection in this echo chamber. Drowning within the endless cycle of overproduction and overconsumption is orchestrated by optimizing our bodies, identities, and subjectivity. My practice ponders my own complicit as a queer, East-Asian descent artist and questions how we can form a solid perspective against the ever more complex and diverse operations of power that always demand us to react and align.
My work explores contemporary image culture integrated seamlessly between urban and digital spaces, attempting to grasp the reasons behind those fleeting moments of displacement. I use artistic methods as visual detours. Re-imagining the digital/urban space into digital recreational areas where viewers can look into and dwell within, encouraging the moments of contemplative lingering. Reclaiming the leisure aspect of our time that is now so saturated with fillers and routines—accumulating a certain visual fuzziness, like a wool sweater, comfortable but full of friction and static. My recent research focuses on images of bodies actively performing for the Internet. Analyzing how bodies voluntarily and involuntarily moved, bent, optimized to examine the digital intimacy formed based on affirmation and desire. cv
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