Rapunzel – The seeing text
Wen Wu
2025
Oil on canvas
30 cm x 25 cm
The painting “Rapunzel – The seeing text” by the London based Chinese artist Wen Wu shows an Asian looking young woman as bust portrait in quarter profile directed to the left. Her torso is bare. She covers the lower part of her face with a red book. Only her eyes, the bridge of the nose and her forehead with her parted hair is visible. Since the model slightly bows her head, the onlooker can see the top of her head. This intensifies her downward gaze and makes her appear smaller. Her long dark braided plaits decline first over her shoulders to vanish behind the book. Then they become visible again to curve over the upper edge of the book and fall down over the spine. Held together by blue ribbons, the unbraided hair tips extend to the low edge of the image. Hence, the allusion to the title “Rapunzel”. Moreover, the braided plaits underline her youth. By her posture and her downward gaze, she seems to be shy and hesitant. Her nakedness might be an expression of vulnerability or defencelessness.
On the cover of the book emerges the upper part of a face. It seems to repeat the young woman’s down looking eyes like a shadow. The background is undefined in green and brown tones. In contrast to the fine brushstroke of the woman’s image, the rear plane is rather roughly executed. The canvas seems to shine through. This underlines the tenderness, perhaps the vulnerability of the model. However, the red book could be her protective shield. This would explain her nail varnish, which repeats the colour of the book and connects the person with it.
The light incidence comes frontal from the right. Therefore, a part of the face, the neck and her fingers are in the shadow, whereas her left shoulder and the upper part of her face are illuminated. This highlights her head and could symbolise the woman’s mental world. In contrast, her fingers, agents of action, are not highlighted even though, they are holding the book. The plaits seem to be more active. They are growing over the spine to reach out to the other side of the book.
Since several years, Wen Wu is interpreting her “Rapunzel” continuously. In Nostalgia (2015) the red book rests across the protagonist’s upturned face. In the later versions from 2024 (Rapunzel 1, Rapunzel 2) she holds the book in front of her face. In consequence, the face remains invisible. “Persona” from 2025 shows the same posture, but the face is reflected in front of the book in half transparent like in our example. Only in the presented work, “Rapunzel – The seeing text” the eye-area is depicted opaque. Could these paintings witness a personal development to more self-confidence of the artist?
Fascinated by the fairy tale of Rapunzel, Wen Wu transfers the story to her own experience. Instead of a female from the western hemisphere, the artist choses a Chinese woman, as a role model for herself. The red book represents the Little Red Book (Quotations from Chairman Mao), a compilation of quotations from speeches and writings by Mao Zedong. Published from 1964 to 1979 it was widely distributed during the Cultural Revolution in China. As generations of Chinese people, also Wen Wu grew up with this book, which imparted the doctrine of the Chinese Communist Party of that time. In her personal interpretation, the Little Red Book stands for the tower of the fairy tale, where Rapunzel is enclosed. This could be both, the “tower of ideology” or the “tower of knowledge”: Ideological because it refers to the Little Red Book; knowledge, since the upper part of the protagonist’s head is illuminated. Moreover, the artist often includes books in her paintings.
Marked by her education in communist China, Wen Wu extended her antennae to the western world, like the woman’s hair grows in the painting over the Little Red Book. Like the hair in the fairy tale, it is the connection to the outside world. Though there is neither a witch nor a prince in sight. Rather than waiting for someone taking her by the hand, the Chinese Rapunzel breaks out of the tower, even though she was hesitating in the former versions. In the presented painting, she cautiously raises her face over the books edge. Nevertheless, her gaze is still directed downwards, but the hairy antennae are already further.
In respect to the additional title “The seeing text”, there are various interpretations possible. It could be meant that the text is visible for the protagonist, perhaps visible like understandable? Or is the text seen by the model, in the sense of illuminating the models mind? If the text is the media of liberation both could be the case. Regarding the eyes on the cover of the book, it could be the text, which is “seeing” or the protagonist who is looking through the text to the outside world. However, the text is an element, which is not represented in the fairy tale of Rapunzel. In consequence, it should have a special meaning to the artist.
By adding and changing components regarding the ancient tale, Wen Wu transforms it in direction of her personal experience. Though, the emblematic long hair as symbol for the connection to the outside world and the conversion from the given world to another are still present. In the case of the artist, it is the cultural, social, political and geographic relocation from an oriental world to the occident.
In addition to her painted Rapunzel series, Wen Wu echoes her vision in a poem:
Braids slip from the red book like rivers from a hidden tower.
She is Rapunzel, not of fairy tales, but of reality –
a Chinese woman whose hair once marked time,
cut short at the window of freedom
The book is her tower; its pages, her walls.
Sever the braids and she walks free.
Wen Wu
Born in 1978 in Qingdao, China, Wen Wu trained as painter from an early age. Consequently, she studied painting at the Tsinghua University in Bejing. Graduated under the international renowed artist, writer and art critic Chen Danqing, she completed her studies with a MA in Fine Art at London Metropolitan University.
In the oeuvre of Wen Wu, women are the main protagonist. Frequently depicted nude, they are accompanied by books or symbolic objects that extend the narrative beyond the body. Figures may appear folded, elongated, or inclined away from the viewer, sometimes shown only as torsos, since she uses Chinese characters as point of departure. There are several women, with an open book placed on their head or lying across their upturned face. Here, the artist translated one of the Chinese pictograms for “peace” 安(ān) into her visual language. The meaning of the symbol is woman at home or in the house and stands for settled, peace and quiet, free from worries. In the paintings, the book functions as house or roof. In this sense, the book is a home and/or a protector.
Books are a recurring motif in Wen Wu’s oeuvre. This might originate from her love of intellectual knowledge and in consequence her personal passion for books. Moreover, they have most of the time a biographical meaning to her. Thus, a red book stands for the Little Red Book (Quotations from Chairman Mao), omnipresent during her upbringing. In her long lasting and still ongoing series of interpretations of the Rapunzel fairy tale, the red book represents the imprisoning tower, which could be both, the “tower of ideology” or the “tower of knowledge”. One example of the Rapunzel series is “Rapunzel – The seeing text” from 2025, which is our Artwork of the Month of September 2025.
Furthermore, other volumes from her personal collection are protagonists in Wen Wu’s paintings. Some are clearly identifiable like the novel “Justine” by Marquis de Sade in the painting with the same name from 2023. Other books are depicted abstractly, reduced to blocks of colour, sometimes with vague shades. Here enters the artist’s personal colour symbolism, which has also its significance in other accessories or in the mostly undefined backgrounds. The blue could express melancholy, green and ochre nature and forests.
Wen Wu executes her paintings in a soft, neo-realistic style. Even though, her early artistic environment might have been orientated to socialist realism, her artistic influences come more from western art history, namely the 19th-century French Romantic plein air painting, literature, the English Pre-Raphaelites, and the School of Paris. Besides personal interest, this might be the heritage of her teacher, Chen Danqing, whose earlier works had similar sources of inspiration. Another hint to Chen Danqing could be the preference to small-scale canvases, which he used in the beginning of his career, for example in his “Tibetan Series”.
The artist participated in many group exhibitions and had several solo shows, inter alia in the gallery Riflemaker in London, who first hosted “Wen Wu’s paintings” in 2015. Besides numerous presentations in galleries, museums and art fairs across London, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Saatchi Gallery, her works travelled internationally to Beijing, Seoul, and Taipei. Most recently, her paintings were featured at the Women in Art Fair (2024). In 2011, she was honored with the prestigious BP Portrait Award.
Wen Wu is represented by Virginia Damtsa and lives and works in London.