Yu-Wen Wu is an interdisciplinary artist. Born in Taipei Taiwan, Wu’s subjectivity as an immigrant is central to her artwork, creating an intersection of personal narrative and global discourse.  Arriving at an early age, her experiences have shaped her work in areas of migration, examining issues of displacement, assimilation, and the shape of identity in a new country. At the intersection of art, science, social and culture issues, and the natural world her wide range of projects include large-scale drawings, site-specific video installations, community-engaged practices, and public art.

Some of Wu’s recent exhibitions include features at the Rose Art Museum,Waltham MA,  Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; Amon Carter Museum Fort Worth, Tx, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington:  Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece; Xippas Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland; Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, NY;  SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe NM;  Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College, Northfield, MN; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis MN; Center for Border Studies, Cucuta Colombia; and Praise Shadows Art Gallery, Boston, MA. 

Wu is committed to creating participatory community projects most notably the durational work Leavings/Belongings with iterative installations in Maine, Massachusetts, Minneapolis and Santa Fe.  Wu’s other large-scale public works include Lantern Stories (2020-2022), an outdoor public artwork commissioned by the Greenway Conservancy for Chin Park in Boston’s Chinatown and a similar project in San Francisco’s Chinatown in October 2022; We Belong (2022), a traveling light-based public artwork supported by Now + There and a City of Boston Transformative Public Art grant; The Poetry of Reason (2022),  a wall sculpture at Tufts University Cummings Center; and Terrain (2016),  a sculptural wall drawing for the Chao Center at Harvard Business School.

Wu has received numerous awards, including the inaugural Prilla Smith Brackett Award (Davis Museum, Wellesley M ,and a national grant from the Union of Concerned Scientists.. She was recently been awarded the 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize with a solo exhibition at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, a 2024 Trellis Stepping Stone Grant, and as the 2024 Artist in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Her work is included in several private and public collections.