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.