Walking to Taipei

In 2010, unable to afford airfare from her Boston home to visit her sick grandmother in Taiwan, artist Yu-Wen Wu, in a moment of Herzog-like madness and faith, Googled instructions for walking to Taipei. To her shock, a set of 2,052 directions appeared. She printed out the 95-page document. In a mystery that could only exist in the algorithm, when she returned to print out a duplicate document, the instructions were gone and never came up again. The universe had granted this navigational map from a vanishing world just once.

2010/2022 , Mixed media on Dura-Lar
rice paper, acrylic scroll ends, wooden scroll box,
20'' x 20'

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NEW YORK MAGAZINE
ART REVIEW JUNE 7, 2022
”Yu-Wen Wu’s Algorithmic Odyssey Around the World”
By Jerry Saltz, New York’s senior art critic

Our species believes that lonely pilgrimages have magical powers. In November 1974, WernerHerzog received a call from Paris telling him a dear friend there was sick and would probablydie. Herzog “took a jacket, a compass, and a duffel bag,” according to his diary, Of Walking in Ice, and started out from Munich. Taking “the most direct route to Paris in full faith,” he believed his friend “would stay alive if I came on foot.” Anyway, “I wanted to be alone with myself,” he said. A few weeks later, he reached her home and the two ate boiled fish together. Later that evening, he told her, “Open the window, from these last days onward I can fly.” …

Walking to Taipei suggests that these warring feelings reflect the experience of the immigrant: people between worlds, with double consciousness, never at home, here and not there. Wu’s incredible crossing of cultures, traversing great distances while being everywhere at once and nowhere at all, puts us in touch with the cosmic force that Herzog imagined watched over all such personal pilgrimages.