Mali Wu

Wu completed her college degree in German Language and Culture at Tamkang University in 1979. She moved to Vienna, Austria, in the early 1980s and then moved to Germany to study sculptures at the Arts Academy of the City of Düsseldorf with Günther Uecker. After graduating in 1985, she went back to Taiwan, where a martial law lift triggered significant socio-political and economic changes. As society swiftly shifted focus, Wu took a strong interest in the emerging social, political and historical hierarchies.[2]

In 1995 she had a group exhibition Balanceakte in the Ifa-Galerie Bonn of the Instituts für Auslandsbeziehungen. In the same year she was represented at the 46th Venice Biennale (Palazzo delle Prigioni) with the installation Library. In 1997 she presented the exhibition Segmentation/Multiplication: Three Taiwanese Artists, with Marvin Minto FANG (范姜明道), TSONG Pu(莊普).[3] In 1998 she was represented in the Bonn Woman's Museum in the exhibition "Half the sky" with the video work History of Woman by Hsing-Chang.

Since the 1990s she has produced a series of projects, and criticized the state of social and political affairs from a feminist perspective in her works. Parallel to her practice, she led the translation of two important texts, Suzanne Lacy’s Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art and Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, into Chinese. In 2007, she organized a conference “Art and Public Sphere: Working in Community”—and later edited a volume of the same title—to unite local practitioners, theorists, and officials. She is also an art teacher, and heads the Graduate Institute of Interdisciplinary Art at National Kaohsiung Normal University in Kaohsiung. In 2014 she curated a large exhibition titled Art as Social Interaction, showcasing socially engaged projects of 30 artists and groups from Taiwan and Hong Kong. She is also active in building regional networks.[4]

She also launched a series of community-based projects of new public art, including the participatory art workshop “Playing with Clothes” organized by Awakening Foundation as part of Awake in Your Skin (2000-2004), which reversed the tradition of women’s needlework and discussed women’s lives through clothes and weaving; Art as Environment: A Cultural Action on the Tropic of Cancer (2005-2007) in Chiayi County which promoted equality of cultural participation rights in rural areas; By the River, on the River, of the River – A Community Based Eco-Art Project (2006); Restore Our Rivers and Mountains – Along the Keelung River, a collaboration with a community college attempting to stimulate discussion about rivers and current environmental issues. Wu has consistently dealt with ecological issues by adopting art as an approach to bridge culture and nature, demonstrating the potential for contemporary art and the vital personal energy of an artist.

In 2018 she was an artist in residence at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore[5] and co-curator of the 11th Taipei Biennial with Francesco Manacorda.[6]

• Katy Deepwell: Mali Wu. A Profile. In: n.paradoxa. International Feminist Art Journal. Ed. Katy Deepwell, Vol. 5, November 1997, ISSN 1461-0434, S. 45–53. (english)
• Mali Wu (2015) "Who's listening to whose story?", World Art, 5:1, 187-197, DOI: 10.1080/21500894.2015.1070744
• Tung Wei Hsiu "When Social Practice Art Overcomes Globalisation: Attending to Environment and Locality in Taiwan" Culture and Dialogue 6, (2018) 223-250.

• Works by or about Mali Wu in libraries (WorldCat catalog)