Rain Wu is an architect whose practice extends across art and design to include installation, drawing, curating, set and building design. Wu’s architectural training informs her artistic practice, and her collaborations with Eric Chen, a scholar and principal architect of ArchiBlur Lab, include projects that consider the connections between bodies and controlled landscapes, and how the organic functions within order. For the 2017 Sharjah Biennial 13, they produced Collectivism, an installation constructed out of 700 bulletproof shields. The structure wrapped around a garden that visitors could walk into, and referenced Taiwan’s recent civil protest movements and the conflict between what is individual and what is institutional. Threshold of Being is an elevated structure that appears as a wall or bridge rising between two rows of fruit-bearing trees at the edge of the Palestinian Museum’s gardens. Constructed out of galvanised steel and Jerusalem stone, the structure is walled off, almost imprisoned, indicating both access and separation. This work has a particular relationship with the present; the walls and gates are erected as physical barriers, separating people, obstructing the continuity of land and cementing division as the new normalisation. Threshold of Being, 2017.
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