Christine Wu’s oil paintings feature multi-layered images of figures with haunting and sensual undertones, often reminiscent of double-exposure photography. She likens the people that she paints to apparitions, displaying a sort of uneasy flux about them and evoking a sense of nostalgia for distant memories. When we last caught up with her, Wu explained, “The concept behind the work is a variation of the ideas that appear throughout my paintings: the feeling of or search for transcendence.” Since then, Wu has moved from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, New York, where she has been busy working on her latest body of work that debuted over the weekend at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles.
Christine Wu with her artwork on opening night of “Sleepless.”
Titled “Sleepless”, her new paintings continue to capture her restless subjects in fragments of time, draped in sheets as they move around in their bedrooms. Her works are not only layered visually with oil paint, glitter, and gold leaf, but conceptually as well; inspired by the things that keep us awake at night, while translating how we occupy space and how body language can change the mood of that space. In a conversation with her gallery, Wu discusses how her exhibition also presents a sort of evolution in her work: “My work is definitely more emotional, but that’s an easily misinterpreted scenario since our emotions are informed by observations. It’s all personal in the end, that’s something my work will not be able to escape.”
“Sleepless” by Christine Wu is now on view at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles through February 20th, 2016.
Opening night photos by Mik Luxon.
