Making-Thinking in the Visual Arts A Visual Art and Art History Speakers

YAN WU: BEING AWKWARD

"I work across public art commissioning, critical writing, translation, and exhibition-making at the intersection of contemporary art, architecture, and urban design — moving between practice in the field and research in the academy, domains that rarely align. This talk considers what it means to inhabit those misalignments rather than smooth them over. Instead of assuming that making and thinking must be integrated or resolved, I’m interested in their productive awkwardness — the moments when practice and theory coexist without needing to justify one another. What if not fitting becomes a method?"

— Yan Wu

Yan Wu is a curator, translator, and writer based in Toronto. She is currently the Public Art Curator for the City of Markham and pursuing a PhD at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. Previously, she was Curator-in-Residence at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2016–17), Assistant Curator for the inaugural Shanghai Urban Space Art Season (2015), and Co-Curator of the Canada Pavilion at the 5th Bi-City Urbanism/Architecture Biennale in Shenzhen, China (2013). She has co-translated into Chinese Passages in Modern Sculpture by Rosalind Krauss, Six Years by Lucy Lippard, Rock My Religion by Dan Graham, Formless by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, and Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel by John Cage. She also authored the Chinese text for M+’s online exhibition Marcel Duchamp: Lessons for a Creative Life from Box in a Valise. Her writing has appeared in Artforum.cn, ArtReview Asia, Canadian Art, PUBLIC, and e-flux Criticism.

Making-Thinking in the Visual Arts: A Visual Art and Art History Speakers’ Series

How do the processes of making and thinking intersect, or become entangled, in the work of artists, critics, curators, and art historians? This provocative question anchors this new Speakers’ Series presented by the Department of Visual Arts and Art History of York University. The series brings together a dynamic roster of local and international voices to explore the rich terrain of contemporary art making, curatorial innovation, and critical art historical research. From studio to seminar, from exhibition to essay, this series invites us to consider how making and thinking about art are not separate acts, but deeply intertwined modes of understanding expression today.

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