In 1999, Wu Li-yu started her art career with her contemporary art style revealed by many artworks of flowers, still life, landscape and ballerinas. She has a realistic art style combined with caring and elegance, as manifested by her masterpieces created in the early days, which is highly regarded by many artwork collectors. In 2010, she flew to China for advanced study. In 2014, she earned her Ph. D. degree in art creation and theoretical study from China Academy of Art. Later on, she resided in Canada and then in New York. While in China, she studied with classmates from many countries. During her sojourn in foreign countries, she frequently joined art exhibitions, and has thus improved her art thoughts with an insightful view and an exceptional approach to art creation.  

Mixed media collages  

There was a time that Wu Li-yu was commissioned by a lace corporation. It was the first time for her to create lace flowers. Female portraits and flowers were the two themes of her artworks. She used to create artworks using realistic skills and impressionist skills to construct her painterly structure with her brushes, colors and light. With her profound interest in lace flowers, Wu Li-yu started a series of experiments using lace collage, oil paintings and acrylic pigments to create lace flowers in different ways, and has made many breakthroughs. In 2018, she put her artworks together and presented this series “Desires in an Unchartered Territory.”  

This series of artworks “Desires in an Unchartered Territory” is made up of mixed media collages. Artists pasted, affixed and dyed hundreds of lace flowers using glue, lace flowers and oil colors. Then, artists shaped female figures using lace flowers’ contour. This is how a series of semi-erect and semi-figurative female portraits were completed one after another. Wu Li-yu’s art concept dates back to 2013 – 2014 when she took part in a French female artists’ touring exhibition “She Views Herself.” Many female artists from all over the world were invited to this exhibition, using art symbols to examine themselves and empower themselves through various media such as paintings, sculptures, devices, videotapes and photography, and at the same time responded to contemporary females’ political, gender and social topics in a global context. Since then, Wu Li-yu has opened up a new horizon for her art career, making use of symbols to portray females in a brand new way.  

Transformation from vision to concepts  

When artists create collages using different materials, they are faced with a critical challenge which requires them to demonstrate their fluency in material properties and art skills. To this end, they have to get rid of the conventional wisdom about material properties, and at the same time construct an art identity for the materials when they create artworks for final presentation. Most importantly, artists have to break through their stereotype of art and modify their art views in order to transform themselves once again. In the transformation process, artists have to transmute their art skills, materials views, and art views. For Wu Li-yu, it was the most crucial point in her art career.  

Over the past three years, the artists involved in this series “Desires in an Unchartered Territory” have improved their creation skills as they repeatedly adjusted the realistic part and symbolic part of women’s portraits, and at the same time the artists have produced larger artworks. Up until today, the artists have produced more than one hundred large artworks with improved 3D effect, which contributes to the high relief effect of the artworks. In the beginning, the artists made portraits for a single person or two persons only. Now, the artists have made many portraits for groups of people. The artists have repeatedly figured out different ways to present the lace flowers’ contours and three-dimensional weaving threads, pondering how to characterize women’s faces, and using different colors’ dyeing effects to improve the visual beauty of artworks with an enhanced significance to signify women and flowers.  

The imagery of “flowers” and “hairs”  

In this series “Desires in an Unchartered Territory”, all female portraits have no emotional expression and reveal no difference in races, ages and skin colors. All portraits have a unified face which aims to reduce the sense of reality implied by real people. Taking a symbolic and unified approach, Wu Li-yu has freely produced her artworks which disobey the social and historic rules as opposed to the conventional realistic portraits. Highlighted by a delayering background, these female portraits look so abstract, as if they have nothing to do with our world at all. Their beauty, elegance and slimness perfectly match the male’s traditional esthetic orientation. Their mistiness and namelessness imply the elf’s ethereality which exists in fantasy only.  

Yet, these women are seemingly showing off their sexual attractiveness, leaning to one side and looking back with their quick-witted and daring eyesight, as if they are trying to attract people’s attention. In stead of being watched by people, they want to look at people and show off their desires. Their postures are full of dynamics and emotions. The artist deliberately exaggerated the women’s intertwined hairs which are swaying upwardly. The hair’s motions are against the natural law of gravity, as if the hairs are full of energy, just like Medusa’s snakes that extend their heads towards all directions. Flowers are vigorously blooming on the gentle and elegant women’s beautiful hairs. Layers of petals grow freely, just like islands drifting on the water. Each and every part of the women, such as hairs, body and skeleton, is made up of genuine lace flowers. There is no doubt that, in the portraits, women speak for flowers, and at the same time flowers speak for women.  

In the Holy Bible and in the Greek Mythology, men’s hairs have much to do with strength. In the Old Testament, Samson’s superhuman strength originated from his hairs. In Greek mythology, Megara King Nisos’ blond hairs are the source of his life. Women’s hairs, however, signify fear, for example Medusa’s hairs (snakes) scare men off. In ancient Europe, people believed that witches hid their witchcrafts in their hairs. It seems to us that, in the society dominated by male’s discourse right, men are extremely afraid of the strength manifested by women, and with their fear, men will do everything to eliminate women’s strength. Most interesting, the artists have subtly put together flowers and the attractive young women mentioned in the classical art “Flora”, creating a number of pleasant and striking female figures for this series “Desires in an Unchartered Territory”, implying that women served as the objects for men to project their sexual desires. Nonetheless, the artists piled up lace flowers to create a three-dimensional effect to upgrade the visual sense of “flowers”, putting together flowers and “hairs” (seemingly implying the female’s awareness of independence through “Comb Sisters” which literally means “a woman who combs her hairs by herself”) to imply the combination of “reproduction” and “self-awareness.” In other words, this series “Desires in an Unchartered Territory” was meant to imply women’s awareness of their bodies and their sexual desires in contemporary society.  

Goddess’ body, women’s desires  

In the western art history, “Flora” has been a popular subject matter for portrait paintings over the past centuries, particularly in the Renaissance. Many prominent artists have produced “Flora” portrait paintings, for example Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) in the early stage of Renaissance, Portrait Master Titian (1488-1576) in the heyday of the Renaissance, Rembrandt (1606-1669) in the Baroque period, and Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the early 19th century, to name just a few. Young women’s beautiful faces and their youthful years have much to do with spring flowers. The portrait were intended for male viewers and served as an incarnation when male viewers watched the portrait and cast their desires on it. Actually, the portrait corresponded to men’s sexual desires which originated from mythology. All artists viewed Flora in different ways. Sandro Botticelli interpreted Flora as a stereotype of goddess. Titian treated Flora as a secular courtesan. In Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s paintings, Flora was depicted as a slim and pale woman. There was no doubt that the portraits have pointed out the inexplicable worship of morbid beauty at that time. For this reason, “Flora” painting was exclusively produced for men to cast their desires when they watched it. Rembrandt was probably the only exception because he was the first artist who portrayed “Flora” as a common woman.  

Wu Li-yu started out from women’s standpoint. She has observed women’s sexual awareness intensively and extensively, and with her endogenous egoism and fearlessness, she has accepted men’s gaze confidently. Nevertheless, she has never changed herself simply because men are staring at her. She has incorporated the definition of beauty made by women – the apotheosis originating from women and exclusively for women – into her artworks. In her portraits, hairs and flowers are intertwined to signify genital organs (flowers) and human body (hairs). Using her aesthetic language, she has pointed out that the contemporary female seem to be acting fearlessly, but actually they are acting independently, pursuing their right to satisfy their desires on their own. In the old days, however, women in the patriarchal society had to please power holders and satisfied the mainstreamed men’s sexual desires in order to reproduce themselves. Today, the society respects individualism and multi-dimensional values. As such, women are encouraged to pursue self-fulfillment, which conforms to the mainstreamed awareness and the non-mainstreamed awareness of the society. In this connection, this series “Desires in an Unchartered Territory” has moved one step further and incorporated women’s self-fulfillment into its subject, using colors and collages pasted with different materials to reveal women’s pursuance of physical freedom and self-determination for their desire satisfaction in contemporary society.