Wu Di: Zero Degree of Image

START Museum will launch the first edition of its long-term experimental project, “Wu Di: Zero Degree of Image” on August 13, 2026. The exhibition will be presented in Hall A on the first floor of START Museum and will run through September 27.

This exhibition marks the first major museum presentation of Wu Di’s work to date. As the first artist case study in the “Zero Degree of Image” project, Wu Di has spent more than two decades developing an artistic practice in which her works function as an evolving collection of experimental samples. Through the circulation of images, the materialization of language, and the power relations embedded in color, she seeks forms of artistic expression that possess a distinctly contemporary force.

Wu Di moves freely through images drawn from both Chinese and Western art history, social news, and cultural circulation, extracting any image that, in her perception, embodies symbolic power. Here, her individual perception takes precedence over established hierarchies of art history and social reality. By stripping these images of their original cultural and historical contexts, she reconfigures visual perception through the formal construction of the image and relationships between colors, attempting to establish a new kind of sanctity and authority for the image. Yet this “sanctity” and “authority” are themselves provocative, illusory, and fleeting: they are torn apart by dense, meticulous brushstrokes, eroded by repeatedly layered colors, and ultimately dissolved by the rough textures the artist deliberately leaves exposed. In this process, Wu Di once again completes another layer of deconstruction within her own image-making.

Formally, Wu Di’s art is equally fluid, unruly, and free. She is never confined to a single medium: oil painting, drawings, collage, sculpture, installation, sound, and even light and shadow can all become means through which she captures and constructs images. In this exhibition, monumental oil paintings are rendered with the lightness and immediacy of sketches, compelling viewers to attend closely to the subtlety and tactility of her brushwork. On wooden panels, she collages canonical images from art history, reconstructing their compositions and backgrounds so that these classics appear suspended within contemporary technologies of reproduction, radiating a renewed “sacred aura.” She also makes innovative use of expansive fields of highly saturated, pure color—not according to the logic of abstraction, but as a means of confronting the “symbolic violence of color” within consumer culture.

This time, Wu Di consciously and assertively assumes the position of the artist to directly challenge contemporary systems of power, the sanctification of art, and the logic of contemporary image circulation. In doing so, the exhibition reveals the intellectual depth and powerful, fearless approach to life of a female artist.