Anne Wu’s work draws from architectural structures and decorative elements commonly found in existing urban landscapes, particularly Chinese immigrant neighborhoods, and explores personal history, cultural narrative, and collective identity. Wu creates sculptures that reference specific thresholds—stoops, doorways, and arches—transitional spaces that suggest passage between public and private realms while documenting moments of individual taste. She highlights culturally-specific design features like geometric patterns, brickwork styles, and ornamental motifs, pointing to a diasporic community’s shared aspiration for class ascension and sociocultural preservation. As architectural fragments, Wu’s work evokes the abrupt experience of leaving one plane of existence for another, whether through death, migration, or a continuous search for home.
Anne Wu was born in 1991 in New York City and grew up in Fujian, China, and Flushing, Queens. Her work has been exhibited at Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon (New Lebanon, NY), The New York Public Library (New York, NY), BHQFU (New York, NY), 67 Ludlow (New York, NY), and Public Address (Brooklyn, NY), among others. She was a 2015 Artist in Residence at BHQFU. Wu received her BFA from Cornell University in 2013 and her MFA from Yale University in 2020, where she was awarded the Critical Practice Research Fellowship and the Fannie B. Pardee Prize for Excellence in Sculpture.
