L. Song Wu
My work explores feelings of alienation vs. belonging and desire vs. violence, shaped by my experience as an Asian American woman in the west. Using 2D mediums like oil and acrylic on canvas, I create figurative paintings that navigate the tension between intimacy and distance. I often place Asian female figures in surreal, emotionally charged settings—faux-European villas, glowing nightscapes, or flattened fantasy spaces—where they become subject, object, and spectacle all at once. Their direct gaze and deliberate ambiguity invite, resist, and complicate the act of looking.
Drawing from sources like anime, landscape, pop culture, and personal memory, I construct scenes that reflect today’s fragmented visual culture and its saturation with conflicting images of Asian femininity. I’m interested in how race, gender, and power play out through surface, pose, and image. Influenced by scholars such as Anne Anlin Cheng and Vivian Huang, I think of inscrutability not as a limitation, but as an aesthetic and affective strategy—a way of withholding or refracting the gaze as a form of agency and resistance.
Ultimately, my paintings aim to expand how Asian American femininity is seen, felt, and imagined. By blending the personal and cultural, I intend to create a space within painting for complexity, contradiction, and presence.
L. Song Wu is a figurative painter originally from Tampa, Florida, currently dividing her time between northern California and Milan. Her paintings explore the tension between intimacy and alienation, challenging viewers to confront their own sense of belonging and constructions of place and femininity. Drawing from a range of sources like anime, YouTube thumbnails, and memory, Wu creates a meticulously crafted world that refracts her ideas of place and self in today’s dizzying contemporary landscape. Wu’s work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She has been selected as a finalist for the AXA Art Prize and the Tournesol Award.
L. Song Wu on Her Paintings, Symbolism, Life, and More | 9 December 2024 by Ruben Palma for Overstandard
“The environments that emerge in my works distill the essence of places I’ve been to or dreamed of, populated by anonymous figures—representations of people I must have encountered in dreams or nightmares.” LINK
L. Song Wu’s ‘Gleaming Things’ is a provocative study of the fictional and the self | 10 November 2022 by Alexandra Blum for Stanford Daily
“[Wu’s paintings express] dysmorphia tied to perceptions of Asiatic beauty, as well as American traditions of passion and violence.” LINK
