Xiwen Wu

About

Wu Xiwen is an illustrator and printmaker based in London, UK and Nanjing, China. Her artistic practice is rooted in self-observation and a deep reflection on social phenomena and the rhythms of everyday life. Her recent projects explore the fragile inner worlds of individuals living within capitalist societies and investigate the intricate relationships between artificial constructs and ecological systems.  she seeks to document both the constancy and mortality inherent in matter, tracing the transient nature of human existence.

Wu is particularly drawn to discarded objects and detritus, which she views as tangible traces of human activity and social need. Through extensive experimentation with diverse objects and materials, motifs such as fungi and decomposition have become central to her work, serving as metaphors for resilience, transformation, and the shifting boundaries of life.

Wu favors etching as her primary medium for its remarkable versatility, allowing her to seamlessly integrate abstract textures with figurative imagery within a single composition. In the work ‘Edge of the Life’, the interplay of soft ground and photopolymer techniques mirrors her thematic focus on the continual transformation and entanglement of life forms from birth to decay. In the work ‘Being Catabolic’, She also incorporates UV printing to transfer textures onto various surfaces, currently emphasizing domestic and natural materials, aiming to construct a non-anthropocentric ecological consciousness. Ultimately, her work embodies a restless search for stability amid chaos, reflecting the fears, hopes, and ambiguities that define contemporary living.