Simon Wu
is an artist based in New York. He is a 2018-2019 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and serves as the Program Coordinator for The Racial Imaginary Institute.
Louis Osmosis and Thomas Blair:This is your captain speaking
By Simon WuIf Pornhub had a section called “art-for-pay” (maybe next to gay-for-pay), we might find some of the beautiful, cynical things in This is your captain speaking there.
Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin: Microbial Speculations on Our Gut Feelings
By Simon WuNightclub incubator is the mood of Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin’s residency at Recess, corroborated by its magenta light and pulsing, electronic soundtrack tuned to a specific frequency to stimulate bacterial growth. It is not a bad summary of her aims either: to create a collective space for speculating on the possibilities for transcendence, sociality, and care that the microbial might give to us today.
ANOHNI: LOVE
By Simon Wu“I think about holding space for vanishing,” ANOHNI recounts in the press release for this exhibition, “of people, of communities, of biodiversity, in a way that opens into spectral time, leaking all points at once.”
Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain: New York Apartment
By Simon WuIn its sparest incarnations, in new developments and renos, all we see are the sanitized appeasement of rented furniture, stock art, and stainless steel appliances. In this way, New York Apartment evokes the disturbing logic of gentrification in what its pictures hide: the displaced.
Viva Ruiz: ProAbortion Shakira: A Thank God for Abortion Introspective
By Simon WuViva Ruiz is the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants, a Queens native, and an artist for whom showing in a gallery is the exception rather than the norm.
Hadi Fallahpisheh: Almost Alone
By Simon WuIn Blind Rat (2019), one of 15 large photographs featured in Hadi Fallahpisheh’s exhibition at Tramps, a rat wears tiny, ’90s Matrix-style glasses and spreads its legs suggestively, its crotch replaced by a mouse hole
Nancy Shaver, Max Goldfarb & Sterrett Smith: fastness, slowness and Monstrous Beauty
By Simon WuThe show is a collaboration between artists Nancy Shaver, Max Goldfarb, and Sterrett Smith. In their artist statement, they suggest that this collection of objects convenes like an “exquisitely discordant" set of sounds, known as a wolf tone to musicians.
Clotilde Jiménez: The Contest
By Simon WuThe musculature of Jiménez’s figures is exaggerated but also flattened, and their genders are ambiguous. Most of them are closely-cropped figure studies, but a portion of them appear to be drawn from memory-scenes or TV broadcasts.
Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit
By Simon WuFor the last four decades, Tishan Hsu has worked across sculpture, video, painting, and photography to consider the question: “How do we embody technology?”
Carl Craig: Party/After-party
By Simon WuParty/After-party (2020) is the five-year lovechild of Detroit-based DJ/producer Carl Craig and curator Kelly Kivland, a sound-and-light-installation that turned the basement of the former Nabisco packaging factory into a hologram of a night club.
Janiva Ellis
By Simon WuMuch has been written about how Ellis’s paintings attest to the pain and sexualization of African American women, but hidden within and below this interpretive paradigm is a messier, more inconvenient model of identity that doesn’t fold as quickly into an established institutional narrative.
