Person
Artist
Wu Yuren
吴玉仁
Date of birth
1971
Place Of birth
Changzhou, Jiangsu, China
Biography
Multidisciplinary artist and activist Wu Yuren was born in Changzhou City, Jiangsu Province, in 1971. He graduated from the Art Department of Jiangsu University of Technology, Changzhou, in 1994. Drawing from his experiences of protesting the forced evictions and demolitions in Beijing’s art districts that took place leading up to and following the Beijing Olympics, he began to create his series of lightbox installations, many of which focus on issues of censorship in China. Protests came to a head in 2010, following which Wu was arrested, tried, and jailed for almost a year. Wu’s artistic practice and his activism have been documented by The New Yorker, the New York Times and National Public Radio. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions such as ‘The Truth is Concrete’, Rome Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome, Italy (2018); ‘On Parole’, Klein Sun Gallery, New York, NY (2015); ‘Some Years’, White Box Museum of Art, Beijing, China (2010); and ‘Man-Made Environment’, The Little Gallery, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada (2006). Group exhibitions include ‘Heaven in a Room’, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, ltaly (2020); ‘Task of Remembrance’, The Chinese Culture Center, San Francisco (2019); ‘Not On Site: Absolute Threshold and a Type of Site-Specific Drift’, Nanjing University of the Arts Museum, Nanjing, China (2015) and ‘Unlived by What is Seen’, Galeria Continua, Beijing, China (2014). Wu Yuren currently lives and works in New York.
