Julie Wu

Holding On

Clay, terra sigillata

A trio of arms expressing moments before a soul leaves the world.

Julie Wu's current artistic practice is drawing and sculpting the human form, where she documents figures from life and translates their data into fragmented bodies in clay. She probes the most tender yet extreme spectrums of human emotions to better understand the limits of sentient depth. In our current digital fabric that is saturated with immense focus on artificial intelligence, she believes that it calls for a deep reflection on what it means to be “human.” A distinct qualification that makes an experience human, arguably, is connection—how are meaningful connections cultivated so that we can make room for healing?

About the artist

Julie Wu

American

Julie is a licensed architect and self-taught software engineer by trade. Growing up in Taiwan, Canada, and the United States, she felt her passion in art early on and took drawing, sculpture, and ceramic classes throughout her schooling. Architecture introduced her to a blend of the creative and technical against a deeply rooted social backdrop. As an architect, her research interests contend with social justice on an urban scale and address issues sensitive to the human body both in their built and virtual environment. Amidst the pandemic, she entered a design competition with her colleagues to design a WFH space for the Next Work Environment, which sparked Julie’s curiosity about how software can be designed to deliver human-centered experiences and ignited her pursuit to become a software engineer. Using software as a tool on top of her propensity as a systems-thinker, Julie builds with a keen interest in design systems, accessibility, and the problem space of human interaction with AI. Despite her many interests, Julie always finds her way back to art. She continues to stretch her creative capacity by spending late nights drawing the human figure and making the ceramics studio her second home.