YAN WU
What Is Your First Language?
Project
Yan Wu’s project aims to articulate a critical framework for understanding language in diasporic contemporary art beyond identity, toward a condition of uneven access, mediation, and persistence of language. Building on her curatorial work with Chinese Canadian artists Morris Lum and Paul Wong Wu will investigate how Chinese characters for instance don’t simply function as readable text nor opaque visual signs but rather operate as traces of language that remain active even when detached from full linguistic competence calling into question the assumption that language belongs to, or is fully possessed by its speaker. Instead it suggests a “post-loyalist“ relation to language, in which script, meaning and affect circulate beyond the boundaries of literacy, producing layered and uneven modes of encounter.
Chinese in this context, does not simply signify cultural belonging; it functions as a material and conceptual element that exceeds the artist’s direct linguistic competence. Wu’s project shifts the focus from identity to language—from what the work represents to how language operates within it. In doing so, it situates these practices in closer dialogue with traditions of language-based conceptual art, where meaning emerges through structure, mediation, and the limits of legibility.
What Is Your First Language? will take the form of a bilingual essayistic script developed through field research, conversations with artists, and close analysis of artworks and sites. Her research will follow four trajectories (Historic Chinatown; Commercial and Suburban Chinatown; Conceptual Chinatown and Global Circulation Chinatown) following the formation of the mentioned linguistic condition across archives, artworks, restaurants, suburban malls, migration routes and systems of global circulation.
SUPPORT IN PRODUCTION OF DISCOURSE — 2026
Chinese in this context, does not simply signify cultural belonging; it functions as a material and conceptual element that exceeds the artist’s direct linguistic competence. Wu’s project shifts the focus from identity to language—from what the work represents to how language operates within it. In doing so, it situates these practices in closer dialogue with traditions of language-based conceptual art, where meaning emerges through structure, mediation, and the limits of legibility.
What Is Your First Language? will take the form of a bilingual essayistic script developed through field research, conversations with artists, and close analysis of artworks and sites. Her research will follow four trajectories (Historic Chinatown; Commercial and Suburban Chinatown; Conceptual Chinatown and Global Circulation Chinatown) following the formation of the mentioned linguistic condition across archives, artworks, restaurants, suburban malls, migration routes and systems of global circulation.
SUPPORT IN PRODUCTION OF DISCOURSE — 2026
biography
Yan Wu is a curator, writer, and translator based in Toronto. She works as a public art curator with a focus on the intersection of contemporary art, architecture, and the making of public space in urban contexts, and alongside this role maintains an independent practice focused on contemporary conceptual art, writing, and translation.
Her writing has been published in e-flux Criticism, PUBLIC, Canadian Art, ArtReview Asia, and Artforum.cn, among others. She previously served as English editor of Time+Architecture at Tongji University (2016–2022). As a translator, she has co-translated Chinese editions of key texts in conceptual art and criticism, including Rosalind Krauss’s Passages in Modern Sculpture, Lucy Lippard’s Six Years, Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion, and Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss’s Formless. She also co-translated John Cage’s Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel for M+ and contributed Chinese-language texts to the museum’s digital project on Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise.
Her curatorial work engages closely with conceptual art practices, with an emphasis on language, publication, and mediation. Recent projects include Tom Dean: GOOD-BYE at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (2025), focusing on the artist’s early conceptual works and urban interventions, and Interior Chinatown: Morris Lum, the artist’s first museum solo exhibition examining the spatial and cultural conditions of Chinatowns across North America (McMaster Museum of Art, 2026; Varley Art Gallery of Markham, 2027). Earlier projects at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto include Making Models, Immaterial Architecture (online), and Miao Ying: A Field Guide to Ideology.
Wu is currently a PhD pre-candidate at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto, where her research explores play-space as a framework for a public art research lab.
Her writing has been published in e-flux Criticism, PUBLIC, Canadian Art, ArtReview Asia, and Artforum.cn, among others. She previously served as English editor of Time+Architecture at Tongji University (2016–2022). As a translator, she has co-translated Chinese editions of key texts in conceptual art and criticism, including Rosalind Krauss’s Passages in Modern Sculpture, Lucy Lippard’s Six Years, Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion, and Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss’s Formless. She also co-translated John Cage’s Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel for M+ and contributed Chinese-language texts to the museum’s digital project on Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise.
Her curatorial work engages closely with conceptual art practices, with an emphasis on language, publication, and mediation. Recent projects include Tom Dean: GOOD-BYE at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (2025), focusing on the artist’s early conceptual works and urban interventions, and Interior Chinatown: Morris Lum, the artist’s first museum solo exhibition examining the spatial and cultural conditions of Chinatowns across North America (McMaster Museum of Art, 2026; Varley Art Gallery of Markham, 2027). Earlier projects at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto include Making Models, Immaterial Architecture (online), and Miao Ying: A Field Guide to Ideology.
Wu is currently a PhD pre-candidate at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto, where her research explores play-space as a framework for a public art research lab.