Ruo-Hsin Wu

Installation view, Ruo-Hsin Wu: Gentle Like Water, April 19 – May 9, 2024. Artwork © Ruo-Hsin Wu. Courtesy of the Artist and ELIGERE. Photo: Heesoo Park

Ruo-Hsin Wu, a Taiwan-born artist who lives and works in London and Taiwan, blends influences from both cultures into her unique artistic style. Her debut solo exhibition in Korea, titled “Gentle Like Water,” features a series of paintings inspired by her secluded experiences in a mountain house surrounded by nature. These pieces reflect her journey of exploring memories, emotions, and solitude in nature, interwoven with her childhood recollections.

Installation view, Ruo-Hsin Wu: Gentle Like Water, April 19 – May 9, 2024. Artwork © Ruo-Hsin Wu. Courtesy of the Artist and ELIGERE. Photo: Heesoo Park

In addition to the iconic children figure in her work, these pieces incorporate elements from her daily surroundings, the darkness of night, the green of trees, the red of the soil, the white walls of her studio, and especially the lake she sees every day through the window. “My studio was once my grandfather’s house, holding many childhood memories with him. In his later years, afflicted with glaucoma, his eyes took on a faint blue hue, with two subtle black shadows above, reminiscent of the lake beyond the window,” the artist recalls.

Installation view, Ruo-Hsin Wu: Gentle Like Water, April 19 – May 9, 2024. Artwork © Ruo-Hsin Wu. Courtesy of the Artist and ELIGERE. Photo: Heesoo Park

Installation view, Ruo-Hsin Wu: Gentle Like Water, April 19 – May 9, 2024. Artwork © Ruo-Hsin Wu. Courtesy of the Artist and ELIGERE. Photo: Heesoo Park

Ruo often begins her paintings with a dark background, applying acrylic paint with her fingers and delicate brushwork, allowing the imagery to gradually emerge on the canvas, layer by layer, much like our memories unexpectedly surface and fade away. While human figures are a common theme in her art, she avoids depicting specific individuals. Instead, she focuses on conveying emotions through the outlines of these characters. Explaining her approach, she says, “There are moments in life that stick with us forever. I don’t try to recreate these scenes; memories are personal. I aim to capture the emotion and atmosphere of those moments, perhaps through depicting a gaze, or capturing the moisture in the air.”

Installation view, Ruo-Hsin Wu: Gentle Like Water, April 19 – May 9, 2024. Artwork © Ruo-Hsin Wu. Courtesy of the Artist and ELIGERE. Photo: Heesoo Park

Growing up, the artist was sensitive to the small things around her, leaving her with vivid memories and subtle feelings that continue to influence her artwork to this day. Interactions between humans and small creatures are often depicted in her artworks. “As a child, I often envisioned invisible beings and imagined interacting with them in the surrounding space. To some extent, even within the confines of a small room, it could have once been an ocean, a forest, teeming with myriad life forms—humans, animals, and plants, all once a part of it.”

Installation view, Ruo-Hsin Wu: Gentle Like Water, April 19 – May 9, 2024. Artwork © Ruo-Hsin Wu. Courtesy of the Artist and ELIGERE. Photo: Heesoo Park

Titled the exhibition “Gentle Like Water,” the artist hopes to reflect the softness and peace of water in her paintings through subtle colour and tone. “When water evaporates from the canvas, leaving behind invisible traces, it marks the completion of a painting,” the artist says. While glaring sunlight and highly saturated colours are rarely depicted in the artist’s works, they exude an atmosphere filled with warmth, air, and moisture. These paintings enable viewers to experience the beauty of light and shadow through tranquil strokes, fostering resonance with the artwork through imagination.

Installation view, Ruo-Hsin Wu: Gentle Like Water, April 19 – May 9, 2024. Artwork © Ruo-Hsin Wu. Courtesy of the Artist and ELIGERE. Photo: Heesoo Park

Ruo-Hsin Wu (born 1993 in Taiwan) is a visual artist working in painting, drawing, and handmade animation. She majored in Animation at Taipei National University of the Arts, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and subsequently pursued a Master of Arts degree in Illustration at the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom.

Her visual styles are dreamy yet bittersweet, fluctuating between innocence and grotesque. The childlike appearance of her work has often packaged uncomfortable feelings and potential threats. Through narrative image-making, Ruo explores the relationship between humans, nature, and other species. Reflecting on her experience, she notes, “Nature is the crossroad of personal and collective memory. Upon moving to London, nature provided me with a sense of intimacy and familiarity.”

Ruo’s work often unfolds against dark or white backgrounds. To convey the complexity of inner feelings, she employs the softness of charcoal, the depth of paint, and the delicacy of pencil, utilizing different mediums to express the diverse textures of the inner world. In her solo exhibition “Sunlight, Air, and Water” in 2022, she presents a series of acrylic paintings, exploring different moments of her childhood that have marked her through to adulthood. She links her creative motivation with the psychological concept of “transitional objects” – a soft, huggable item offering psychological comfort to infants in unfamiliar environments—just like how the artist projects her feelings onto each piece of work to adapt to changing realities and mental states.

Image: Ruo-Hsin Wu in her studio, 2024. Artwork © Ruo-Hsin Wu. Courtesy of the Artist and ELIGERE

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