Zhenyu Wu 振宇

EN
In The Christ Appearing to the Virgin by Juan de Flandes, delicate parchment scrolls (phylacteries) slowly unroll in the air, defying the laws of physics and modern logic to make visible the sacred words exchanged between Jesus and the Virgin.
From the 19th and 20th centuries onward, these phylacteries evolved into speech bubbles in comics. Initially sacred objects in Jewish tradition, then floating elements in Renaissance paintings, they have become, in contemporary digital interfaces, standardized frames of communication. The form of the speech scroll has gradually detached from religious iconography to become part of the visual vocabulary of secular societies and popular culture.
As a visual device, it establishes a paradigm of language and dialogue while standing at the boundary between image and text. It materializes narrative through gestures, postures, directions, and physical supports. Within this dual-faced structure, I seek to question the religious disenchantment at work in the transformation of these forms, but also the moments of re-enchantment in contemporary society — cyclical forms of a return of the divine.
I am also interested in the evolving relationships between text, image, and symbol in religious iconography and contemporary visual culture, especially in the digital diffusion era, where these elements recombine, disarticulate, and interlace anew.
Through this series of works, I use ceramics — a traditional and symbolic medium — combined with voice (off-screen), to construct a narrative at the border between the real and the cultural imaginary, where everyday experiences meet visions of the sacred.

FR
Dans Le Christ apparaissant à la Vierge de Juan de Flandes, de légers phylactères en parchemin se déroulent lentement dans l’air, défiant les lois de la physique et la logique moderne, pour rendre visibles les paroles sacrées échangées entre Jésus et la Vierge.

À partir des XIXe et XXe siècles, ces phylactères ont évolué en bulles de dialogue dans les bandes dessinées. D’abord objets sacrés dans la tradition juive, puis éléments flottants dans les peintures de la Renaissance, ils sont devenus, dans les interfaces numériques contemporaines, des cadres standardisés de communication. La forme du speech scroll s’est progressivement détachée de l’iconographie religieuse pour s’inscrire dans le vocabulaire visuel des sociétés laïques et de la culture populaire.

En tant que dispositif visuel, il établit un paradigme du langage et du dialogue tout en se tenant à la frontière entre image et texte. Il matérialise le récit par le biais de gestes, de postures, de directions et de supports matériels. Dans cette structure à double face, je cherche à interroger la désenchantement religieux à l’œuvre dans la transformation de ces formes, mais aussi les instants de réenchantement dans la société contemporaine — formes cycliques d’un retour du divin.

Je m’intéresse également à l’évolution des relations entre texte, image et symbole dans l’iconographie religieuse et la culture visuelle contemporaine, notamment à l’ère de la diffusion numérique, où ces éléments se recomposent, se désarticulent et s’entrelacent à nouveau.

À travers cette série de créations, j’utilise la céramique — un médium traditionnel et symbolique — combinée à la voix (hors-champ), pour construire une narration à la lisière du réel et de l’imaginaire culturel, là où les expériences du quotidien rencontrent les visions du sacré.

One day, at the beginning of the 21st century, underprivileged children in Africa received backpacks donated by the United States. Printed on these backpacks were characters from Japanese manga, while a small label bore the words: “Made in China.”

“Made in China” has long ceased to be a mere geographic concept. It is a manufacturing landscape that transcends ideologies, crosses political regimes, and crosses cultural borders.

Within this narrative framework, I present more than 1,500 objects and events made or having taken place in China—objects that each of us has probably encountered or used at some point in our lives. For sixty years, these products have quietly, subtly, and ubiquitously shaped the details of our existence, forming a vast narrative network without origin or center.

This installation, in the form of a paper landscape novel, gathers these 1,500 objects into a book of over 1,500 pages. Each page lies flat on the floor, like a missing person poster, waiting for a spectator or local resident to come and write the continuation—by their footsteps, their body, or their own object—filling in the blanks.

As in Borges’s The Book of Sand, each fragment can become a starting point. From these narrative shards, everyone can inscribe their story onto their surroundings—to rewrite, reactivate, and reconfigure.

These objects confront us with an unavoidable reality: we are constantly traversing these production landscapes.

Until, in this fragile expanse, we hear the echo of our steps—and those of thousands of others.

Until we once again walk this borderland—generous, exhausted, and silent.

Performance
10 Minutes
2025

Muß es sein ?
Through this classic existential question, I seek to demonstrate the possibility of the return of what has been excluded from contemporary life and secular thought.
We should imagine la discipline without discipline, a freedom beyond freedom, a modernity prior to modernity.In this performance, the performers settle in a library—a sacred place of knowledge—and use a classic divination tool, the Ouija board (or “spirit of the pen”), to interrogate a trilingual dictionary. The questions posed arise from current social issues and classical reflections on art.
They then invoke a spirit: Monsieur Tsuaf, the great ghost of the library, to whom each performer has contractually committed to complete the ritual.

When the answers no longer rest on established knowledge or dominant disciplines, is it spectral poetry? Or the manifestation of an unknown law, situated beyond the human?

Before modernization, perhaps what comes after already existed.

This is my response to Bruno Latour.

Es muss sein!