KE Wu

About

Artist statement

My painting practice explores the relationship between colour, abstract form, perception, memory, lived experience, and the inner world. Working primarily with oil paint, I do not begin with a fully predetermined image or narrative. Instead, forms emerge through an intuitive process of layering, erasure, accumulation, and return. I respond to what appears on the surface, allowing colour, gesture, texture, and organic forms to develop, transform, and sometimes disappear. I am particularly interested in the moment when a form approaches recognition without becoming fixed. A shape may suggest a face, body, animal, fragment of nature, or something unfamiliar. My paintings move between abstraction and recognition, allowing images to emerge, dissolve, and reappear through the act of looking. Colour plays a fundamental role in this process. I use colour not simply to describe or embellish form, but to construct a perceptual space in which forms and visual associations can shift. Through contrasts of colour, rhythm, density, transparency, and movement, I seek to create vitality while keeping the image open between external perception and inner imagery. This openness also extends to the viewer. I do not impose a fixed meaning on the emerging forms. Instead, the work creates space for viewers to encounter it through their own memories, emotions, cultural experiences, and lived histories. Different viewers may perceive different images and associations; these differences are part of the work's unfolding. I describe this approach as a Self-verifying Artistic Practice: meaning is not predetermined by the artist, but emerges through the viewer's encounter with the work. Ultimately, I am interested in what happens before an image becomes certain—when seeing remains an active process of searching, recognising, and imagining.