An Unfinished Homecoming

Ahead of her new exhibition at Empty Gallery, Cici Wu takes Tatler to a place at once familiar and uncomfortable, caught between cultures and yearning for belonging

- Aaina Bhargava

Tucked away in Grand Marine Center, an old industrial building on an unassuming street in Tin Wan, the vast exhibition space at Empty Gallery spans two floors and is purposefully plunged into pitch blackness. In direct contrast, the gallery’s fifth floor studio, reserved for artists to create in, is almost drowning in natural light. On a brutally hot July afternoon, sunlight poured into the room over a large wooden table cluttered with an assortment of objects: a vase full of minimally arranged yellow flowers; a wooden skeleton made of bamboo and wire, due to become a lantern; mounds of printed academic texts; and sheets of delicate bamboo paper stuck on to boards, a strip or two of film negatives, handwritten notes, and some curious doodles.

In among the visuals on the translucent paper, a cute doodle of a frog pre-leap stands out. “This is just a practice run,” says artist Cici Wu, giggling shyly about her fun motif choice. “It’s all about experimentation—I don’t know what the final result will be. I never think about the visual form first; for me, it’s always process-driven—the most interesting or inspiring thing is experimenting with forms through ideas.”

While Wu’s work isn’t typically amphibian-themed, it is cerebral in nature, heavily drawing from theory, history and philosophy. As is typical of her creative process, Wu has been scouring pages and pages of academic texts and archival materials on a wide variety of topics in preparation for her upcoming exhibition Belonging and Difference at Empty Gallery. The show will feature new iterations of drawings, film, and paper lantern sculptures and installations; Wu is particularly recognised for the latter two media, and was working on such pieces when