Introducing Cici Wu, who will be working in 99 Canal’s STUDIO 2 to produce work for an upcoming exhibition at Scheusal in Berlin, which opens at the end of October and lay down the groundwork for a major Institutional Exhibition opening at The Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, early next year.
Cici Wu is an artist who creates complex, sensory and dreamlike investigations into our cultural and material environment using drawing, video, sculpture, writing and installation. Combining historical research and material experimentation with an acute sensitivity to sociopolitical structures, Wu’s works aim to explore and interrupt dominant narratives on a multitude of subjects, including memory, cinema, history, nationalism, belonging and identity, and relationships between humans and non-humans.
From 2015 to 2021, she worked at non-profit library, archive and research platform Asia Art Archive in America where she assisted digital archiving project Joan Lebold Cohen Archive and spearheaded Betsy Damon Archive: Keepers of the Waters. Both collections of material bring to light under-examined narrative in the history of recent Chinese art and include rare documents about performance art and environmental activism in Chengdu and Lhasa in the mid-1990s.
Cici Wu has had solo exhibitions at 47 Canal, New York (2021, 2018); Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2023, 2019); a collaborative exhibition at Hordaland Kunstsenter, Norway (2023); and has participated in group exhibitions at Outside Art Space, Beijing (2024), the Drawing Center, New York (2023), CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2022), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea (2021), Para Site, Hong Kong (2020, 2018), Loong Mah, New York (2022), Artists Space, New York (2020), among others. She has participated in the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021). She will participate in the Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan (2024) and a commission project with the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai (2025). She is also a participant of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program (2024-2025), New York.
“Spring and summer 2025: Irena Haiduk, Cici Wu and Ash Moniz,” e-flux, 2025
“9th Asian Art Biennial announces full artist participation,” ArtReview, 2024
“Artist Cici Wu on experimentation, how politics and the pandemic have fuelled her work, and her upcoming ‘Belonging and Difference’ exhibition,” Tatler Asia, 2023
“Cici Wu: Lantern Strike (Strong Loneliness),” Brooklyn Rail, 2021
“Your Guide to the Best Shows to See in New York,” Frieze, 2018
Studio Program | 99 Canal
The Studio Program is a one to three-month opportunity for emerging and mid-career artists based both within and outside New York City.
Collaborating with artists, galleries, and institutions, our selection process draws on the insights of the local creative community to ensure a continuously diverse and vibrant studio cohort.
The program initially launched in 2022 as a response to the lack of affordable spaces in Manhattan and provides access to an intimate and context-specific environment to work in.