WU Fangzhou

Wu Fangzhou was born in 2001 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from the Oil Painting Department of the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts (XAFA) in 2023 and is currently a recommended postgraduate Master’s student there. A winner of the “Future Starry Cluster” Innovation Award and the “Imagery Space” Biennale Rising Star Award, his practice uses personal memory as a vessel to explore the complexities of individual perception through mixed-media experimentation.

Wu’s practice investigates the fluidity of personal identity under the impact of popular culture through the deconstruction and recomposition of mixed media. In works such as 20250301 Visitors from the North: Fountain Pools, Love Letters and the Last Tree  and 20250101 Before everything is in ruins, he sutures together heterogeneous materials—wood panels, earth-dyed cotton, parchment, coffee, and volcanic stone powder—to construct psychic fields poised at the threshold between “memory” and “reality.”

Growing up as part of the millennial generation amid rapid urban expansion, the artist deliberately distances himself from prevailing trends, turning instead inward in search of the purity of lived sensation. The mottled textures and low-saturation palette that permeate his paintings allude to the dissolution and reconfiguration of memory. This acute sensitivity to materiality allows once-silent substances to generate a narrative force akin to that of “ruins,” inviting viewers to locate their own resonances of existence within these uncertain visual interstices.