Fu Ya-Wen

Fu, Ya-Wen was nominated by Bamboo Curtain Studio in 2015 International Residency Exchange Project. In fall 2015, the Gyeonggi Creation Center awarded her two months residency. Ya-wen was born in Yun-lin, now lives and works in Berlin and Leipzig.

Bamboo Curtain Studio in 2015 International Residency Exchange Project nominated ya-Wen Fu. In fall 2015, the Gyeonggi Creation Center awarded her two months residency. Ya-wen was born in 1980 in Yun-lin, Taiwan, and graduated Diplom and bachelor of Media Arts, HGB Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, Germany. Since 2009, she joins tamtamART art association as director and has many year curatorial experiences. She currently lives and works in Germany.

Ya-Wen Fu seek to discuss the issues about the definition of human body and the relationship between individual body and external surroundings in her artworks. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes: ”The human body inhabits in space; moreover, it itself is an expressive space.” Body movement is not like playing a musical instrument. Playing a musical instrument is more like using an object detaching from us. However, by creating movement in body, we are also having conversations with it, by which we try to hurdle and define our surroundings. Which means that not only are our behaviors in daily life related to the time and space or culture and society, they are also connected with the conditions and experiences of our body.

Take for example the work of Ya-Wen Fu, in space-in-between she will construct an apparatus that allows her body to extend into space. By using this tool and the movement of her body, she will be able to construct an interactive space. What she would like to explore through the installation performance is how the social system affects and limits our bodies, consciousness and behavior. The 60 iron hoops of the piece are like the interwoven structures of the social system. The connection between the hoops and body is a metaphor for the fact that we can't escape the society. Through the body movements as well as the mutual constraint and pulls between the installation and the body, she is trying to find the body and bodily consciousness that's no longer limited by society. At the same time, it should also present the condition our bodies find themselves in: the struggle of the body against reality and its difference to the imagined.

Even though our behavior is like the bodily acts designed under the social system, the body is not merely a product of the society. When the body is detached from the societal gaze, when it possesses not just the role of a narrator, when it doesn't just represent a shape with meaning, when the body, including all the social system imposed on it, becomes visible, when it is finally exhausted by the endless pulling and pushing, maybe that's when we can find a route of escape in all the despair.

In her case, the perceptions, behaviors and movements of body inspire how she created art. And because of the influences from German and Taiwanese culture, she is also interested in the issue about culture and self-identity. The life experiences from different social cultures make her concerned about abstract imagination of body perceptions. She like to figure out how we manage to strive for coexistence with our own body under diverse circumstances and make it more than a passive medium for information transition and activities; instead, we seek more experiences, possibilities from our body by creating body movements.