Tzuan Wu

Tzu-An Wu makes experimental films. Most of his works are collages with heterogeneous images, audio, and texts in an attempt to inquire about the constructs of narratives and self. In recent years, Wu produced pieces of handcrafted techniques and experimentations with super 8mm and 16mm films, in which the artist explores the junctions and new possibilities of the production technologies for analog and digital images.

a film by Tzuan Wu

After WU’s arrival in New Zealand, WU has been trying to take a photo of the starry night sky every day with his phone, whether or not it was clear. The star photos can be interpreted as diaries. Using a 16mm Bolex camera to film the stars frame by frame with long exposure. Exposure time was determined by the mind. These uneven pulsations of lights correspond to the starlight changing along with the thoughts that were at mind. This film documents WU’s everyday ritual of star-gazing with the related associations and inspirations and forms a meditative process.

Our world sinks, and words, sounds, and images are all immersed in water. The clam spits out a mirage, the mermaid turns into foam, and the human reoccurs. Water means both nurturing and sinking. The inhuman sirens are both beautiful and terrifying. In the cavity called "I", the fluid flow seems to flicker and disappear.

An experimental documentary which opens with a story of my family: my American aunt found a painting of my grandmother by chance, in a random Chinese restaurant in the middle of nowhere - she said she cried. By tracing this story and reproducing its meaning, the film wonders through different topics: the construction of the Cold War, USA and Taiwan relations, different generations of Chinese diaspora since the 1950s, contemporary immigration and cross-nation fluidity, family romances, religion, and ancestors...

A love letter in collage style, consisting of found footage and a strange reading of Kang-Chien Chui’s work, karaoke and diary videos.

Tzu-An Wu makes experimental films. Most of his works are collages with heterogeneous images, audio, and texts in an attempt to inquire about the constructs of narratives and self. In recent years, Wu produced pieces of handcrafted techniques and experimentations with super 8mm and 16mm films, in which the artist explores the junctions and new possibilities of the production technologies for analog and digital images.

a film by Tzuan Wu

After WU’s arrival in New Zealand, WU has been trying to take a photo of the starry night sky every day with his phone, whether or not it was clear. The star photos can be interpreted as diaries. Using a 16mm Bolex camera to film the stars frame by frame with long exposure. Exposure time was determined by the mind. These uneven pulsations of lights correspond to the starlight changing along with the thoughts that were at mind. This film documents WU’s everyday ritual of star-gazing with the related associations and inspirations and forms a meditative process.

Our world sinks, and words, sounds, and images are all immersed in water. The clam spits out a mirage, the mermaid turns into foam, and the human reoccurs. Water means both nurturing and sinking. The inhuman sirens are both beautiful and terrifying. In the cavity called "I", the fluid flow seems to flicker and disappear.

An experimental documentary which opens with a story of my family: my American aunt found a painting of my grandmother by chance, in a random Chinese restaurant in the middle of nowhere - she said she cried. By tracing this story and reproducing its meaning, the film wonders through different topics: the construction of the Cold War, USA and Taiwan relations, different generations of Chinese diaspora since the 1950s, contemporary immigration and cross-nation fluidity, family romances, religion, and ancestors...

A love letter in collage style, consisting of found footage and a strange reading of Kang-Chien Chui’s work, karaoke and diary videos.

Many years after graduation. Some one left earlier while the party goes on. We made a day to visit the green lake together. In that burning afternoon. These fragments of over-exposed, out of focus film were produced without a purpose. Then seamed together by chance. All of these probably are merely a reminder of our rights of indulgence; These are things you should commemorate, these are your memento mori. Thousand layers of Absolute Terror Field. In the center the princess is still praying for maintaining the world. Covered by magic circles, under the urban plan construct with an inverted pyramid shape. She prays in a basement that no one could reach.

This work started as a personal project. The artist initially intended to create a one-man home video only for himself, hoping to gather snippets from his life abroad to represent them as vital parts of his life and temporary definitions, forming a time capsule created to commemorate his graduation. A few months later, the artist restarted this unfinished project and changed his intention during editing. By remaking this essay film using several (pseudo-) video diaries and two different mediums—digital recording and digitized Super 8mm footage, the artist translates private, intimate whisperings into his reflections about memory, viewing, film, and the process of image (re-) production.

This work is an argument initiated with Wendy Brown’s article Resisting Left Melancholy. She applied Walter Benjamin’s notion of “Left Melancholia” to see the political thoughts and the norms in the left-wing movement/ theory traditions as the notion of melancholia. There is the thingness of the thoughts that can see as the lost object. Extends this idea, the thingness of thoughts, come from one’s personal or collective memories could become the pathological fixation.

A study of the plants, ducks and waterfalls in Oakley creek. The film is hand dyed with ferns I gathered in the creek walkway.

Faires decay with self-irrrtation. Sweltering heat, sweats pour from their armpits.

Wandering through and documenting different religious spaces when traveling, then through editing, these half sacred and half site-seeing experiences have been collaged to a passage to another heterogeneous space. Throughout the corridors and doors, The statues of saints and dolls gaze into the after world without the existence of humans, silence in trance. And it is the voice of prayers bringing me back to the mundane world.

The things we had lost in time differ, it is the reason why we can’t grow up together. Some events seem to be not important at the moment might became a crucial milestone in a personal sense. Through retelling and rewriting the memory, the pointless emotions turns to the flowing memory, and being able to preserved. The film was shot in 16mm, based on a childhood (false) memory, transformed with fantasies and symbolic objects, and performed in a public environment. The elements in the film are both the markers of emotion and time, with montage, the outside world and inner scenery came across to each other.

The cat I don't own runs through windows between different spaces and times, and it disappears before finishing a sentence. Using outtakes and rushes (what "fur film" means in Mandarin) to redeem the affects in these images we produced for. The film is the first volume of an ongoing exchange diary project between Erica SHEU and Tzuan WU. From the filming exercises and hand processing from the very beginning, we collaborate and experiment with different workflows of audio and visual between Taiwan and USA.

The cat I don't own runs through windows between different spaces and times, and it disappears before finishing a sentence. Using outtakes and rushes (what "fur film" means in Mandarin) to redeem the affects in these images we produced for. The film is the first volume of an ongoing exchange diary project between Erica SHEU and Tzuan WU. From the filming exercises and hand processing from the very beginning, we collaborate and experiment with different workflows of audio and visual between Taiwan and USA.

Filmed in Auckland, New Zealand.

A documentation of the solar eclipses in an afternoon. I use different filters and multiple exposure, with both negative and reversal film stocks, compose this sketch of the sheltering black sun.

Shot / Edited on 16mm film stock, Cross-Processed by MONO NO AWARE, Transferred by DiJiFi.com.

In the form of a cosmic narrative, Tzu-an Wu imagines a near-future where different species gather in lunar colonies to create something new. The collective unconscious comes to life through the dream of an embryo, thanks to a surreal collage of archives from multiple sources. Between ultrasounds, microscopic shots, and fragments of history, the images are arranged, discussed, and unfurled like a constellation. Halfway between science fiction and philosophy, The Embryo's Dream, Upon the Moon shifts between the subtlest details and the vastest landscapes. From this montage emerges a perceptive human and spiritual meditation on memory and its many layers.

1st sound / image jamming between Amund Ulvestad and Tzuan Wu.

"I believe that a pineapple is the parody of an apple." A Drag queen wants to be pregnant and this causes an unbelievable tragedy. With demonstrating the notion of schizophrenia, this work aims to re-imagine the boundaries between identities and languages, and the impossibility of being “as a whole”.