M Gallery, CICA Museum
March 26 – 30, 2025
2025.3.26 – 3.30
States of Becomings
A solo exhibition by artist Ada Yueting Wu presents a series of performance works completed by the artist from 2019 to 2024. Live, site-specific, and durational, these performances juxtapose the artist’s body with counter-forces, exploring resistance and liberation. In “Red Steel,” Wu continuously hammered nails at an abandoned factory til exhaustion. In “Fleeting but Prolonged,” Wu synchronized her eye movements and dilation with various animal species in pursuit of transcendence.
Ada Yueting Wu is an interdisciplinary artist born in China and currently based in the United States. Through a hybrid language of sculpture, installation, performance, and sound, she creates visceral experiences that critically examine the production of silence and truth within systems of control. She scrutinizes relationships of power and discipline by subjecting the body to counter forces or exposing it as a malfunctioning circuit within various systems—language, ideology, and collective memories. She completed her BFA in Sculpture with a concentration in Computation, Technology, and Culture from Rhode Island School of Design in 2023, where she is currently pursuing her MFA in Digital + Media. Her artistic practice explores these dynamics by exposing internal contradictions and highlighting individual narratives within controlling frameworks. Wu seeks new methods of meaning-making that function outside pre-existing systems. Driven by her background in sculpture, her approach to performance and sound is material-based, physical, and visceral. The process of her creation becomes a performance in itself—one of resistance and struggle—as she subjects bodies and materials to counter forces, pushes them to their limits, and dissects them to their smallest units. Through this methodology, her recent works investigate the materiality of body and sound, exploring the cathartic and poetic collision of these elements within a cohesive experience.
