Yijia Wu is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, and performance. Her practice explores home, memory, and migration through the emotional, cultural, and material significance of everyday objects. Using stone carving, soap, and at times metal casting, she constructs and deconstructs forms as a way of thinking through displacement, attachment, and the shifting nature of belonging.
Drawing from experiences of living between places, Wu is interested in the tensions between solidity and fragility, permanence and dissolution, intimacy and estrangement. Familiar domestic forms often appear in her work, reconfigured to create situations that feel absurd yet familiar, nostalgic yet present.
Through material transformation and fragmented narrative, each work becomes a way of making sense of what resists easy explanation. Together, her works function like puzzle pieces, weaving a larger image of home as something fluid, unsettled, and continuously re-formed.
EDUCATION:
2021-2023 MA Contemporary Art Practice, Royal College of Art
2017-2021 BA Fine Art (First Class Honours), Central Saint Martins
EXHIBITIONS:
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS:
2026 Solo Show, Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts, Nanjing, China
2026 The Desert Wind Will Salt Your Ruins, Krupa Gallery, London
2026 Cherished Chambers, Gallery 46, London
2026 A Place Between the Pines, Crowsley Park, Oxfordshire, UK
PAST EXHIBITIONS:
2026 South Gazing Mountain, Gaia Art Space, Hong Kong, China
2026 Collect, Somerset House, London, UK
2025 House of Bandits at Roche Bobois, Roche Bobois, London, UK
2025 Echo Soho, London, UK
2025 CAIM, Slane Castle, Ireland
2025 Sincerely, Sarabande Foundation, London, UK
2025 House of Bandits x the Roof Garden, London, UK
2025 Danwei Unfolding, TANK, Shanghai, China
2025 To Heaven-gate Ascend, Hypha Gallery, London, UK
2025 Family Portrait, High Road Gallery, Sarabande Foundation, London, UK
2025 Glimpses of the Guest Room, Chilli Art Projects, London, UK
2025 Wild Uploaded, Prequel, the Handbag Factory - ASC Studio Gallery, London, UK
2025 Enosis, Apsara Studio, London, UK
2025 Manifesto, Shanghai Fashion Week, Shanghai, China
2025 Homesick, Sarabande Foundation, London, UK
2025 Selfridges x House of Bandits, Selfridges, London, UK
2024 Ceramics in the City, Museum of Home, London, UK
2024 The Poetics of Reverie, Yongfu 70, Shanghai, China
2024 Landless, The Bhavan, London, UK
2024 Wonderland, Filet, London, UK
2024 Manque, O bjet Petite ’a’, Greatorex Street, London, UK
2024 Roots in the Wind, Crum Heaven, Stockholm, Sweden
2024 Phoney, Gallery Lock In, Brighton, UK
2023 RCA Graduate Showcase, Truman Brewery, London, UK
2023 No Man’s Land, A.P.T. Gallery, London, UK
2023 The Coronation Concert, Windsor, UK
2023 Cosy Ganza, Avalon Cafe, London, UK
2023 Tate Late, Tate Modern, London, UK
2023 Beyond Surface, Montez Radio, London, UK
2022 CAPbaret, Groovy Theatre, London, UK
2022 Bon Voyage, Slash Art, London, UK
2022 Home / Away, The Bhavan, London, UK
2022 BODY ECSTATIC BODY ECLECTIC BODY ECCENTRIC, Ulay Foundation, Slovenia
2021 What Have We Done?, Lethaby Gallery, London, UK
2021 The Showreel Show, Stour Space, London, UK
2021 Cirque de Show, A travelling art extravaganza, UK
2020 Bodies of Water, The Dòng Gallery, Beijing, China
2020 Noting to do with Death, The Dòng Gallery, Beijing, China
2020 Elephant in the Room, The Dòng Gallery, Beijing, China
2020 What and Whatness, The Dòng Gallery, Beijing, China
2020 Sale, Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, London, UK
2019 Open Mouth Film Festival, TT Cinema, London, UK
2019 I Dance the Other, Studio Wayne McGregor, London, UK
2018 Young Modulus, The Crypt Gallery, London, UK
2018 ‘RAW’, Lethaby Gallery, London, UK
2018 Improvisation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
2016 Small Change, Kings Cross, London, UK
2016 1-100, Pangolin Gallery, London, UK
AWARDS:
2021 NOVA Award 2021 (shortlisted)
2021 CASS Art Prize 2021 (shortlisted)
2021 Barry Martin Prize 2021 (Shortlisted)
RESIDENCY:
Sarabande Foundation Residency 2024-2026
COMMISSION:
2025 Creative History of Tottenham, National Lottery Heritage Fund
2023 King’s Coronation Concert, Windsor Castle, Windsor, UK
COLLECTION:
2021 University of the Arts London Collections
ARTIST TALK AND WORKSHOP:
2025 ‘Homesick’ Panel Discussion, Sarabande Foundation
2025 Artist Talk, Wild Uploaded, Prequel, the Handbag Factory - ASC Studio Gallery, London, UK
2025 Domestic Relics: The Poetry of the Everyday, Sarabande Foundation, Hertford Road, London, UK
2025 Artist Crit, Sarabande Foundation, Tottenham, London, UK
PRESS AND INTERVIEW:
LYP Art
Everyday objects and Shifting narratives: Sculpturing home, Memory and Migration
https://youtu.be/giJmqE2_hjY?si=sVMRpJuNLnO_oSgy
Insights of an Eco Artist
In conversation: Yijia Wu
https://www.insightsofayoungecologicalartist.com/features/in-conversation-yijia-wu
Art Daily
Poetic Alchemy: Yijia Wu Transforms the Everyday into Domestic Relics
FAD Magazine
ON YIJIA WU’S MATERIALITY OF TIME
https://fadmagazine.com/2025/06/16/on-yijia-wus-materiality-of-time/
Sarabande Foundation
Homesick Exhibition
https://www.instagram.com/p/DHGWWKvt1GL/
Royal College of Art
Yijia Wu (MA Contemporary Art Practice) - King's Coronation Concert Artwork
https://youtu.be/A9jUOHDE-mo?si=NqLmQ3Yv5SUElEE1
Mula Zine
Poetry and Nomadic Living by Yijia Wu
https://mulazine.com/conversations/poetry-and-nomadic-living-by-yijia-wu/