Working against spectacle: Meet public art curator and alum Yan Wu

Graduate and current PhD student Yan Wu. Photo by Mark Bennett.

For Yan Wu (MVS 2015), a PhD student in the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, contemporary art inspires possibility.  “It completely changed me,” says Wu of Shanghai’s Biennale in the year 2000. “It's the experience you have that stays with you and lingers. That's what I think contemporary public art should be.”

Born and raised in Shanghai, Wu says her formative years coincided with the emergence of the Internet and China’s then underground music scene.  “I consider that [time] the tail-end of the avant-garde movement in China. I saw artists, happenings and performance. It opened the door.”

From computer science to conceptual art

But Wu says she reached a tipping point. She chose to study abroad and completed her bachelor’s in computer science at the University of Guelph, which she says has helped her interpret ‘60s and ‘70s conceptual art.

“I think computer science, especially software engineering, is about studying process,” says Wu. “You translate something into machine language and execute it to see how the process works. That’s basically what conceptual art is to me; sometimes using process as commentary, sometimes appropriating the process itself. I see those connections.”

Wu spent five years working in the field while continuing to contribute to the arts as writer and translator for Canadian and Chinese art and architecture publications, including Artforum.cn and ArtReview Asia, among others. In 2012, she curated the first exhibition of Mitchell Akiyama at Gendai Gallery, a non-profit public art gallery that was then dedicated to showing works by artists with East Asian background. Akiyama is now an assistant professor of visual studies at Daniels. 

A curatorial career

During her Master of Visual Studies, she co-curated the Canadian Pavilion at the Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture with chief curator Janine Marchessault. After graduating in 2015, she spent a year in Shanghai working as assistant curator on the inaugural edition of the Shanghai Urban Space Art Season before holding a curatorial residency at U of T’s Art Museum, where she curated Making Models, an exhibit of experimental architecture projects. Today, Wu is the public art curator for the City of Markham, a role she values in its relationship to curatorial practice, as it goes well beyond the ‘white box’ of the gallery space.

“Public art gives me opportunity to work against spectacle,” she says. “I don't believe in vertical monuments. I believe in horizontal monuments – how this monumentality can be integrated into everyday life.”  

The monumentality of every day mattered most to Wu when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023. “The only way I could cope with my time in hospital, was to imagine what kind of projects I could bring to these spaces. That gave me a lot of joy,” says Wu. 

Personal challenges lead to creating public art

Wu, Kara Hamilton and Patricia Ritacca, all cancer patients, formed the curatorial collective CMBT (Co-conspiracy Means [to] Breathe Together). Together, they brought Between Leaf & Light, an immersive 43-minute soundscape by artist Scott Rogers, to the Hudson Regional Cancer Centre at Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre in Barrie last March. 

“Bringing Scott’s sound installation into the cancer centre felt like expanding what care could look like,” says Wu. “We weren’t interested in decorative distraction. We were asking whether an artwork could engage more of the senses, introduce complexity into the hospital experience and offer patients a different kind of agency. That question continues to shape how I think about public art.”

Originally published by the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.