> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.catapult-platform.art/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Igigo Wu: The Trauma Wears Wings - URL: https://www.catapult-platform.art/igigo-wu-the-trauma-wears-wings/ - Published: 2025-05-29T08:21:28.000Z - Updated: 2025-10-26T18:46:41.000Z - Description: Taiwanese artist Igigo Wu merges painting, textile, and performance to confront colonial trauma, diasporic identity, and the politics of memory. Based in Zürich and Vienna, her work evokes rejection, ritual, and histories too brutal for language. - Author: Dominique Catherina Foertig - Tags: Featured [**Igigo Wu**](https://chunjuwuatelier.cargo.site/welcome?ref=catapult-platform.art) is a Taiwanese multi-disciplinary artist based between Zürich and Vienna. [PALM galleryContemporary art gallery with location in Taipei. Focus on sharing western artists.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/icon/694343_192800.jpeg)PALM gallery![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/thumbnail/250199_216795.jpeg)](https://www.palmgallery.com.tw/?ref=catapult-platform.art) Palm Gallery - Artist - Igigo Wu Her work moves between *painting, performance, and experimental theater* \- but at its core is a consistent, radical question: **What does it mean to carry a history too brutal for words?** ![igigo wu, artist ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/igigo-wu--artist.webp) ****Igigo Wu:**„The Polychromatic Digital Forest in My Dreams.“ Photo by [@raphaelroeoesli](https://www.instagram.com/raphaelroeoesli/?ref=catapult-platform.art) and [@\_laura\_nan\_](https://www.instagram.com/%5Flaura%5Fnan%5F/?ref=catapult-platform.art) ![Igigo Wu performing 'The Polychromatic Digital Forest in My Dreams' at ZHdK Werkdiskurs, wearing moth-inspired textile costume with red lighting and digital projections](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/igigo-wu--performance-artist.webp) ****Igigo Wu:** Her large-scale canvases, cloaked performances, and shape-shifting insect motifs create not a narrative, but a *zone* \- a charged space where memory festers, dissolves, and re-emerges in uncanny forms. For Igigo, art isn’t a representation. It’s an ecosystem. A body. A bruise that never fully heals. --- ![Close-up of embroidered costume used in Igigo Wu’s 'The Polychromatic Digital Forest in My Dreams', hand-painted textile details with organic and insect-like motifs](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/igigo-wu--artist-1.webp) **Igigo Wu:** “The Polychromatic Digital Forest in my Dreams.” -Every thread in Wu’s performance work feels alive — her textile skins evoke both insect and armor, turning trauma into wearable language. Photo: [@\_laura\_nan\_](https://www.instagram.com/%5Flaura%5Fnan%5F/?ref=catapult-platform.art) ## **Where Language Breaks, Igigo Wu’s Paintings Begin** There’s a storm hiding in Igigo Wu’s brushstrokes. You don’t see it right away. At first, her paintings feel organic - like dense vegetation, or the wings of some nocturnal creature. But then the texture changes. The air thickens. You start noticing something: nothing in her work wants to stay still. Figures blur into flora. Canvases hang like ghost-blankets. Even her performance garments - hand-painted, sewn, lived-in — look like they might molt and scurry off without her. ![igigo wu, artist](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/new-faces-in-contemporary-art-2.webp) ****Igigo Wu:** „The Polychromatic Digital Forest in My Dreams.“ Photo by [@raphaelroeoesli](https://www.instagram.com/raphaelroeoesli/?ref=catapult-platform.art) and [@\_laura\_nan\_](https://www.instagram.com/%5Flaura%5Fnan%5F/?ref=catapult-platform.art) Born in Taipei in 1999, Igigo studied Fine Arts and Mixed Media at the Taipei National University of the Arts, graduating in 2022\. Her early work won first prize at the university's annual exhibition in 2020\. But if there’s a throughline in her journey, it’s not awards or milestones — it’s rejection. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/the-polychromatic-digital-forest-in-my-dreams.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/zurich-art-scene.webp) ****Igigo Wu:** From her ZHdK Werkdiskurs presentation, Igigo Wu activates the stage as a haunted ecology — cloaked in moth-wings, drenched in digital red, she turns theatre into a language of refusal. Photo: [@\_laura\_nan\_](https://www.instagram.com/%5Flaura%5Fnan%5F/?ref=catapult-platform.art) Institutional, bureaucratic, linguistic. Her own artist statement reads like a love letter to exclusion: > *"I don’t even know if I’m searching for home, or if rejection itself is the only thing I can fixate onto."* She now lives and works between Zürich and Vienna, but her emotional terrain is more complex - a fluctuating reality shaped by national ambiguity, unspoken trauma, and the dull ache of not being understood. ![Igigo Wu in theatrical costume during 'Walking Landscape' at Zentralfriedhof Vienna, partially veiled, gazing through fabric in performative gesture](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/performative-art.webp) ****Igigo Wu:** Two paintings. One body. A cemetery. And a storm that didn’t stop her. This is action theatre as exorcism — a moment of eerie grace captured in between world Photos by [@raphaelroeoesli](https://www.instagram.com/raphaelroeoesli/?ref=catapult-platform.art) ![Full-body view of Igigo Wu holding two large paintings during site-specific performance at Zentralfriedhof Vienna](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/igigo-wu--artist-2.webp) ****Igigo Wu:** A body becomes a landscape, a painting becomes a burden. In the cold quiet of Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof, Igigo Wu walks grief into visibility — one step at a time. Photos by [@raphaelroeoesli](https://www.instagram.com/raphaelroeoesli/?ref=catapult-platform.art) Taiwan, she reminds us, is “an island without its own name.” And this tension - between nation and narration - courses through every inch of her practice. --- ## **Beauty as Camouflage, Memory as Mutation** A recurring butterfly form appears in her work — a red-eyed, armored hybrid, rendered in oil, fabric, and performance. It’s not a symbol. It’s a symptom. She wears it across cemeteries, stages it in gallery spaces, cloaks herself in its soft violence. It’s part ritual, part effigy. Beauty here is never passive. It’s defensive. Camouflaged grief. ![exhibition at Fabienne Levy Gallery](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/igigo-wu-2.webp) ****Igigo Wu:** Group Show “Space Invasion" at Fabienne Levy Gallery in Lausanne. ![salzburg sommer academy ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/painting-igigo-wu.webp) Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts 2024 “Is painting a language? Or is it mud?” Directed by Ulrike Müller and Evie K. Horton. Her paintings are often large, unstretched, raw at the edges. They read like ecosystems of psychological erosion. In one, a vortex threatens to devour the surface. In another, a fleshy mass blooms and rots simultaneously. ![ZHdK zurich](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/contemporary-art-form-taiwan.webp) ZHdK Werkdiskurs presentation Detail of Igigo Wu´s painting The palette is damp, wounded, compost-colored — as if painted with bruises. There’s no clean edge, no tidy iconography. Just reverberations. ![new female artists](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/female-artists-now.webp) No gesture wasted. Igigo Wu stands still but speaks volumes — her stare holds the audience like a mirror, asking not to be seen, but to be understood. Wu’s performances mirror this instability. They’re cloaked, anonymous, insectile - merging body with textile, memory with motion. She stages herself not as subject, but as site. The garment becomes body. The body becomes archive. --- ## **Expanded Themes in Igigo Wu’s Work** - **Diaspora as rupture, not journey** - **Identity as denial:** Taiwan’s contested selfhood and inherited silence - **Rejection as method:** Institutional, national, linguistic, emotional - **Painting as political body:** Not depiction, but incarnation - **Memory as decay and camouflage:** A bruised ecology of visual language - **The limits of verbal articulation:** Visual language where speech fails --- ## **Notable Motifs & Visual Tactics** Wu’s work often returns to insectoid and vegetal motifs — moths, wings, soil, skin. The butterfly isn’t decorative. It’s dangerous. ![notable work igigo wu](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/igigo-wu--notable-works.webp) ****Igigo Wu:** Welcome to the labyrinth. ![performance igigo wu](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/igigo-wu--performance.webp) ****Igigo Wu:** A still from Wu’s performance piece at ZHdK - part-installation, part-ritual - where fabric, video, and trauma coalesce in a dreamlike digital forest. Photo: [@\_laura\_nan\_](https://www.instagram.com/%5Flaura%5Fnan%5F/?ref=catapult-platform.art) Her cloaked performances collapse the border between human and insect, person and nation, body and myth. Other works conjure terrain - not physical landscapes, but *psychic* ones. Graveyards, ruins, mist, tile, swamp. Zones where history doesn’t die. It mutates. --- ## **Artistic Context & Comparison** Where many diaspora artists build bridges between cultures, **Igigo** **Wu digs tunnels** — dark, damp, unresolved. ![performance art now ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/new-performane-artist-now.webp) Igigo disappears into her own myth — half-lit, half-hidden, her presence flickers like memory itself. In this scene, the body becomes data, and silence becomes choreography. Photo: [@\_laura\_nan\_](https://www.instagram.com/%5Flaura%5Fnan%5F/?ref=catapult-platform.art) Her work doesn’t declare itself political — it metabolizes politics through ritual, silence, and haunting materiality. Unlike artists who render trauma through symbolism or didactic gesture, Igigo’s method is subterranean. She plants seeds in the viewer’s subconscious and lets them fester. ![igigo wu artist](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/05/igigo-wu-1.webp) ****Igigo** ****Wu**: Portrait of the Artist [@prakeemo](https://www.instagram.com/prakeemo/?ref=catapult-platform.art) Hair by [@anna\_abrahamson\_](https://www.instagram.com/anna%5Fabrahamson%5F/?ref=catapult-platform.art) at [@shyandflo](https://www.instagram.com/shyandflo/?ref=catapult-platform.art) Her contemporaries might include **Lucy Dodd** (who treats painting as living entity), **Firelei Báez** (whose mythologies map trauma), or **Louise Bourgeois** (particularly in textile and psycho-emotional resonance). > **But Wu’s voice is unmistakably her own: intimate, volatile, and never seeking clean resolution**. **Spoiler, but worth saving:** A new iteration of this project will unfold at the upcoming **ZHdK graduation show “All Dimensions”**, curated by **Gloria Hasnay**. [Editor’s Choice: 7 Artists You Need to Know7 contemporary artists to watch: Igigo Wu, Marcus Soddano, Abel Kabel, Max Grote, Charlie Stein, Anji Woodley and Jonny Alexander. Selected by Munchies Art Club![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/icon/munchies-art-club-magazine-162.png)Munchies Art Club MagazineErnst Koslitsch![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/thumbnail/new-faces-in-contemporary-art-1-1.jpg)](https://www.catapult-platform.art/editors-choice-7-artists-you-need-to-know/) More Artists on Munchies Art Club Radrar #7 Mark your calendars — the opening takes place on **June 5th, 2025 at 17:00**, deep within the shifting corridors of ZHdK. Expect nothing static. Expect everything haunted. --- More about [**Igigo Wu on Instagram**](https://www.instagram.com/igigo.wu/?ref=catapult-platform.art) or her Website [welcome — Chun-Ju, WuExhibitions![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/icon/favicon-12.ico)![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/thumbnail/DSC_6690.jpg)](https://chunjuwuatelier.cargo.site/welcome?ref=catapult-platform.art) --- ## Support independent art writing: Become a Supporter or Patron This is independent art writing - no paywall, no ads, no bullshit. ****If you value this voice, support it.** [Learn more about Membership ](https://www.catapult-platform.art/join/) [Ask Kurt – A Curatorial Global Network ProjectYOU DON’T NEED TO BOOST. YOU JUST NEED THE RIGHT PLATFORM. Better than an open call ! We give feedback and a chance of a feature. No Free on Munchies Art Club - This Summer!![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/icon/munchies-art-club-magazine-129.png)Munchies Art Club MagazineDominique Catherina Foertig![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/thumbnail/ask-kurt-munchies-art-club-1.jpg)](https://www.catapult-platform.art/ask-kurt-a-curatorial-global-network-project/) ****Your Work needs attention ? - Ask Kurt !** --- ## Related Reads [Felix Stöckle: New Face in Contemporary Art from SwitzerlandExplore the dynamic world of Felix Stöckle, a Swiss artist whose innovative use of materials and exploration of themes like tradition, rituals, and cultural identity challenges and captivates.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/icon/munchies-art-club-magazine-585.png)Catapult - The New Munchies Art Club | Critical CuratorsDominique Catherina Foertig![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/thumbnail/felix-st-ckle--promising-new-emerging-artist-now--2024-3-3.webp)](https://www.catapult-platform.art/felix-stoeckle-artist-promising-emerging-art-switzerland/) Felix Stöckle - Swiss Artist [Maria Luz: Contemporary painting and film photography of everyday objects in LisbonMaria Luz paints and photographs everyday urban objects with clear light and exact color, turning overlooked scenes into calm, durable images.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/icon/munchies-art-club-magazine-586.png)Catapult - The New Munchies Art Club | Critical CuratorsDominique Catherina Foertig![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/thumbnail/Maria-Luz_studio-portrait-by-Meeshy-Martin-3-copy-6.webp)](https://www.catapult-platform.art/maria-luz-contemporary-painting-and-film-photography-of-everyday-objects-in-lisbon/) Maria Luz - Artist Spotlight [Anton Adamer: Exploring the Intersection of Material and Method in Modern ArtDiscover the artist Anton Adamer as he challenges traditional norms by using unusual materials to craft his distinctive artworks.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/icon/munchies-art-club-magazine-587.png)Catapult - The New Munchies Art Club | Critical CuratorsDominique Catherina Foertig![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/thumbnail/anton-adamer--promising-art-student-in-sculpture-and-installations-art-2.webp)](https://www.catapult-platform.art/anton-adamer-artist-material-and-method-in-modern-art/) Anton Adamer - Emerging Artist --- ## No fluff. 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