Igigo Wu
Taiwanese multidisciplinary artist based in Vienna, working across painting, drawing, writing, video, and performance. Her practice explores the entanglement of personal memory and colonial history, particularly the complexities of Taiwanese identity shaped by Japanese occupation and global power structures. Through her evocative visual language, Igigo transforms her body into an instrument of historical and cultural translation. Her work moves fluidly between media and disciplines, often unfolding as both intimate storytelling and political intervention, inviting viewers into a shared terrain of invisible narratives, ancestral echoes, and unresolved questions.
In conversation with Igigo Wu during the exhibition Oltre la pietra at Castelgrande, Bellinzona.
What is the purpose in your work?
My work is mainly about the idea of history, but history through different forms of language. For example, before arriving in Switzerland, I worked mainly on videos, but now I'm more of a painter and I'm moving toward theater. For me, it's just the idea of translation: how I can talk about a story through different media and different forms. The inspiration for my story comes mainly from my interest in exploring Taiwan's colonial history and my identity. For example, we Taiwanese have a very politically controversial identity or nationality. So, in the sense that this ambiguity or this dilemma, like with visas or nationality, led me to study the path of my identity. So I started looking at colonial history before World War II, during the Japanese colonization. And my approach begins with a very personal perspective, in my micro-history.
Most of the stories I listened to, which inspired me in my theater, come from my grandfather. So, my interest, to summarize it, is to articulate the entanglement of colonial history that has become embedded in my identity.
Tell us about the project you exhibited at Oltre la pietra
I'm bringing four paintings and a theater piece called “Polychromatic Digital Forest in My Dreams”, which is a work based on two research projects I've done over the past two years related to Japanese colonization in Taiwan. The theater is about a Japanese teenager who died in the Pacific War, which is a true story I heard from my grandfather. He was sent to the South Pacific to fly kamikaze fighter planes. He has a tomb at my grandfather's house without his body, but with symbolic clothing and hair. I began to integrate myself into the identity of the Japanese soldiers. Where did he come from and why did he fly on a fighter jet? I imagine him as a spirit awakened from the cemetery and realizing that he no longer exists in the past or the present. He no longer exists in Japan or Taiwan because Japan surrendered, and Taiwan is no longer a colony of Japan.
© Photos by Pietro Cardoso
What is the purpose in your work? Most of my paintings are quite large, 140 to 160 cm. When I carry them, I can only see my feet and the painting. Painting is like a walking landscape. This is what allows me to integrate the idea that if I carried my landscape and walked, my body would be an instrument to activate myself in the environment, to create this social intervention with my environments (...). If I carry my painting as an instrument, the whole city is my theater. It's a bit like Shakespeare. The whole city is supposed to be a passive environment, but through my active intervention, it becomes activated, like an environment where people are forced to interact with me, even if they don't want to. I also like to mix it up. When your environment is too peaceful, it's also my artistic desire to intimidate, to create this turbulence in society. To create a reaction.
I think for contemporary artists, true integrity is that we have the power to destroy those boundaries, in a metaphorical way, but beyond the stone, meaning that the stone is only a temporal or artificial construct. We must look beyond the stone to find the similarity and community that we all have as human beings.