To engage with Wu Jiaru’s practice is to be struck by the disparate media she employs—from early explorations in digital media, video, and 16mm film to more recent sculptures, readymades, and paintings. Wu repeatedly returns to historical and social moments that have contributed to the formation of her identity, and through utilizing various tools she has created an imaginary and compassionate world that speaks to the entanglements between humans and machines.

In an early kinetic installation, titled C Bacon (2016), Wu used algorithms to deconstruct well-known triptychs by the late British painter Francis Bacon. Triptychs and polyptychs were often used in Christian art to tell religious stories; here Wu created a digital triptych in an attempt to engage the audience with more immediacy, as well as raise certain questions. Bacon’s twisted figures respond as viewers move in front of them, altering their shape and their structure. By doing so, Wu wanted to question whether the “logic of sense” (to quote a term coined by the late French theorist Gilles Deleuze) in Bacon’s paintings can, using contemporary technology, be extended from two dimensions to three dimensions. At the same time, she explores whether the loneliness, vulnerability, and suffering depicted in such paintings can be transformed through technologically engendered kinesis and interaction.