Taiwanese artist Wu Chia Yun is using a range of media—including video, installation, printmaking, drawing, and photography—to explore complex questions of identity, family, and nationhood, particularly in relation to Taiwan’s contested status. Her upcoming exhibition at Photo London will present two bodies of work, *mother-land* (2024) and *A Song for Loss* (2020), both of which delve into the intertwined personal and political narratives shaping her experience.

Wu’s artistic approach draws inspiration from the Chinese ink-wash painting tradition that emerged during the Tang dynasty in the seventh century. This style prioritizes emotional expression and spirit over realism, utilizing broad, monochrome brushstrokes to convey the essence of a landscape rather than its precise appearance. Similarly, Wu constructs layered compositions that reveal shifting and multifaceted identities. She combines “empty shots” from filmmaking with scanned and rephotographed family images to express fragmented and abstract emotions, assembling these elements into a cohesive narrative framework.

In conversations about her work, Wu reflects on the inseparability of family and nation, themes that arose organically rather than intentionally. Taiwan’s ambiguous international status—recognized as an independent country by only a handful of nations and regarded by China as a renegade province—permeates the emotional terrain she navigates. The island’s isolation and vulnerability are embodied in recurring imagery of water, which represents both fluidity and volatility. In her portraits, water appears as sunlight reflecting off the ocean around her father or as droplets obscuring her mother’s face, symbolizing separation and ambiguity within personal relationships.

Wu also addresses the political tensions surrounding Taiwan’s sovereignty through visual motifs such as the color red, traditionally associated with China. Red features prominently in several images, appearing as fireworks, expanding circles, or encroaching edges, suggesting a sense of pressure and dominance. These elements underscore the ongoing struggle between aspirations for freedom and the realities of geopolitical constraint.

Overlaying one coastal image is a verse from Kahlil Gibran’s *The Prophet*, contemplating freedom’s paradoxical nature and the persistence of unseen forces that may bind or limit it. Wu’s work wrestles with similar dilemmas: how can an island or a people assert autonomy while overshadowed by a powerful neighbor? Is true freedom attainable, or might one form of control simply be replaced by another?

Throughout, Wu’s art evokes a delicate balance between opposing states—light and shadow, water and stone, liberty and captivity—reflecting both her personal narrative and broader questions of identity in Taiwan. By revisiting historical artistic traditions and incorporating contemporary techniques, Wu offers a nuanced meditation on what it means to belong and to exist under complex conditions of political and emotional uncertainty.