Yu-Wen Wu
August 6, 2025
Your project Reigning Beauty adorns the Isabella Stewart Gardner’s façade. How did the location of your project influence its conceptualization?
Last year, I had the tremendous privilege of being the Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. As Artist-in-Residence, I was able to spend time wandering the galleries and Courtyard during the evening when the museum had emptied out of visitors. I also had access to the archives of Isabella Stewart Gardner's travel albums. Inspired by so much of the collection within the palace, I was drawn to the living collection, Mrs. Gardner’s passion for gardens and her knowledge of horticulture. She was dedicated to creating a space that is open to the public and filled with such a breathtaking and diverse collection of plants and flowers that would change throughout the year. This resonated with my deep personal affinity for the natural world evident in my own work and life. I was inspired by Mrs. Gardner’s informal documentation of the flora she encountered in her travels. She pressed plants from the locations she visited into multiple huge travel albums. These pressed flowers and the huge chrysanthemums on display during my time at the museum stayed with me as I worked on ideas for the facade.
Reigning Beauty is inspired by the vision of the past and present, and the enduring yet fragile beauty of nature that has always served as a core inspiration for my own work. I hope that Reigning Beauty reflects on the preciousness of nature while also expressing that the fate of our planet is in our hands.
Can you share a little about the process that went into creating Reigning Beauty?
Reigning Beauty is a digital collage of cascading flora against a stormy sky, composed of drawings, watercolor paintings, and photographs. I gathered together the many photographs I had taken during my artist residency of the museum’s courtyard and their off site greenhouse. The courtyard flora would change, of course, it's a living masterpiece. I also began researching the pressed plants in Isabella's travel albums more deeply and incorporated many of these in the façade. At the bottom of the façade is a scholar's rock, which I made for an exhibition titled Re/Generation shown at Praise Shadows Art Gallery last year. The scholar’s rock is culturally significant to me. They are generally found in the natural world and can vary in size, from an object that can be placed on a desktop to enormous versions in man-made gardens. The scholar’s rock acts as a portal to inspire viewers to contemplate the natural world, maybe even the universe.
There are some interesting parallels in the way that a garden can be a living masterpiece and the idea of public art acting as a living masterpiece because of the way the public is invited to interact with it.
That's a good point—the human interaction with gardens and with works of art in public spaces.
I've done several public art projects, from The Greenway to, of course, the Public Art Accelerator (a program of Now + There, now Boston Public Art Triennial), as well as several large commissions in institutions. I am thrilled that Reigning Beauty is part of the Triennial 2025. I love the theme of the Triennial, The Exchange. It's all about transcending barriers between disciplines. In my practice, I seek to transcend disciplines and definitions.
In my work, the more research I do and the more I dive into each project, the more I find it astonishing how many connections are revealed. For instance, interconnections between art and science, history and culture, community, and my own personal history and story. Reigning Beauty is a public artwork that incorporates many disciplines: history and culture, botany and horticulture, and the environment.
Can you share a little about your Public Art Accelerator project?
I was in the Now + There Accelerator program in 2020. We were able to hold in-person meetings at the very beginning, but when COVID happened and everything was shut down, it was more challenging to see projects through. I had intended my project to be one of community engagement. COVID brought the importance of social connection with one another and the community to the forefront. We Belong is an artwork connecting and belonging in the larger community.
We Belong is made of LED lights, with a neon effect. It reads “We Belong here together guided by the same stars” in a circular spiral form. I intended for the piece to travel to different locations throughout Boston. It was installed in East Boston for quite a while, and ultimately, installed in Boston City Hall, where it will permanently reside as one of the city’s first public art acquisitions. It seems as if it was meant to be for the site.
Another public art installation of yours was Lantern Stories, which was commissioned by the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy in 2020.
In 2020 the Greenway conservancy commissioned a light project for Boston’s Chin Park—by the Chinatown Gates. I created thirty one lanterns to illuminate Boston’s Chinatown’s history, culture, and community. The images on the lanterns relate the long and fraught history and legacy of Chinese immigration in the United States. This project involved historical research and collaboration with Boston's Chinatown community. I engaged the community to share individual and family stories. I held various listening sessions at the Pao Arts Center, where residents recalled histories of displacement, of immigration, and establishing themselves and one's family in a new country and a new community. The stories were full of multi-generational voices. People shared educational achievements, entrepreneurship, arts and culture, and activism. There has been quite a lot of activism in Boston's Chinatown. I dove into historical photographs from the Chinese Historical Society of New England’s archives of Boston's Chinatown and incorporated them into the lanterns. It brought people together in civic dialogue and illuminated the past and present of Chinese immigration by recognizing the plight of historically marginalized communities. Lantern Stories was installed in a bicoastal iteration in 2022—simultaneously exhibited in Boston and San Francisco.
I also wanted to discuss your project, Walking to Taipei. In that project, you turned data into art in a very original and fascinating way.
In 2010 I wanted to see my grandmother in Taipei. The airfare was exorbitant and I typed into a Google Maps search that I wanted to walk from Boston to Taipei. It gave me 95 pages of 2052 instructions on how to make that journey. It advised that I travel from Boston to Seattle, then down to Hawaii, and then across the Pacific by kayak to Japan. It then offered instructions for navigating through southern China, and then from China to Taiwan. The project took a long time. It took a while to figure out how to represent this in the right way. The final iteration is a 20’ x 20” long scroll, a format that lends itself to representing a journey unfolding. It was very much a project of longing.
Much of your work examines data and is guided by extensive research. Is that related to your background at all?
I have a degree in neuroscience and psychology. I didn't study art formally until after college. After graduation, I worked for a period of time at Harvard Medical School in the Neuroscience Research Department. One day, I was coming off the elevator, and everyone was popping champagne. I was 21 at the time and thought, Wow, this is a great place to work. Turns out Dr. David Hubel, my mentor at that time, had just won the Nobel Prize with Dr. Torsten Wiesel.
It was a tremendous honor to work for him. I learned so much. As a neurophysiologist and scientist, Dr. Hubel felt that art was essential. He encouraged all his grad students, lab assistants, etc., to take writing, visual arts, or music classes. He himself was a flutist. So I started taking classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Eventually, I decided I would leave science and go into art. I think that scientific and artistic research are very similar in numerous ways.
What do you hope a visitor experiences when they encounter Reigning Beauty?
I hope those who encounter my work will experience the need to pause and be inspired to investigate further. I hope that time with Reigning Beauty connects them to joy, but at the same time to a meaningful moment with nature in their own lives, and perhaps it can serve as a reminder of how precious and fleeting the natural world is and how we are part of the story.