Jenny Wu
(She/Her)
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Articles by Jenny Wu
Sim Chi Yin’s Revisionist Impulse
The artist explores the limits of firsthand knowledge, research and the pursuit of historical truth Some say photomontage was invented in 1918 by Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch, who were inspired when they came upon, in homes on the Baltic island of Usedom, coloured lithographs of Prussian musketeers posing in front of barracks. These were generic military mementos, but each family’s had been personalised with a cutout photograph of their son’s face pasted on top of another soldier’s.
The 10 Exhibitions to See in September 2026
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month – from Bangkok and Berlin to Yogyakarta and Tokyo Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, and Hélène Tréheux-Duchêne, ambassador of France to the United Kingdom, at the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum, London London The Bayeux Tapestry This September, the British Museum is rolling out the carpet: the Bayeux Tapestry.
Notes from New York: How to Manage an Artist’s Estate
You could be cleaning out storage units, taking inventory, digitising papers and creating databases – or just seducing their landlord Before he died in 1989, the queer experimental filmmaker Jack Smith had turned his downtown apartment into the set of a feature film he never made, titled ‘Sinbad in a Rented World’. Judging by footage from 1990, Smith liked to write on walls; he’d painted his ceiling blue and left behind campy murals of goddesses with plaster cones for breasts.
Rocky: Highs and Lows
Is it populism or profit that’s catching the eye of Philadelphia’s Rocky-obsessed cultural tiger, wonders Jenny Wu According to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s latest publicly released strategic plan, the museum aims to ‘increase average annual attendance to more than one million visitors within five years’. In an attempt to court these audiences, the PMA embarked on a botched rebrand in 2025, which coincided with the firing of the museum’s CEO and director.
The Digital Jungle: On Datacenters and Slaughterhouses
Feeding the AI rush, datacenters are everywhere now. Jenny Wu connects the architectural vacuity of the server farm to a longer history of ‘dirty’ work In 1946 a journalist for The New York Times reported enthusiastically from the unveiling of the world’s first general-use computer – the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (‘Eniac’ for short) – in Philadelphia. ‘Those who witnessed the demonstration entered a 30-by 60-foot room.
The 10 Exhibitions to See in August 2026
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month – from Seoul and Sharjah to Birmingham and Boston Karimah Ashadu, Cowboy (still), 2022.
Im Youngzoo: Requiem for Technological Progress
A recent exhibition suggests that our drive to develop new technologies indicates a spiritual need to manage ‘existential uncertainty’ This dense, heady show by Seoul-based artist Im Youngzoo is anchored by an hour-long, seven-channel video installation.
Notes from New York: Spectral Architecture
In Chinatown, a new ‘jailscraper’ project includes retail space and art galleries for the general public, accomplishing – as farce – the abolitionist goal of making carcerality disappear In this city, it’s taken for granted that construction is happening all the time everywhere. Hunter-green plywood walls with diamond-shaped apertures – the standard modesty screen for building works – are so ubiquitous as to become overlooked; in New York, their colour is for the street what blue is for the sky.
Why Can’t Art Biennials Be Small?
Largescale international fests have dominated the artworld in recent decades. A series of new exhibitions attempt something more local, but what, Jenny Wu asks, does it mean to be a local in the first place? In the window of a café in Medina, New York, was a canvas on a brass easel depicting two hummingbirds kissing a floral arrangement, a framed gel-pen drawing of a dragon curled around a yin-yang symbol, a painted Christmas ornament.
The 12 Exhibitions to See in July 2026
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month – from Jogjakarta and Cape Town to Arles and Eindhoven Phan Quang, Re/cover No. 1, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2014.
59th Carnegie International Review: The Action is Elsewhere
Featuring 61 artists from around the world, If the word we broadly addresses notions of community and connection A miniature glass reproduction of the demolished sixteenth-century Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, India, sits a windowsill in Jasleen Kaur’s installation Supra (all works but one 2026), an empty, red-carpeted room.
ArtReview Summer 2026 Issue Out Now
on the cover Saodat Ismailova, photographed by Claudio Fleitas in Paris, May 2026 ***Subscribe now or get your copy from our online shop*** In the wake of the Venice Biennale, and global politics more generally, national identity – what is it? How does it get decided? – is a hot topic in the artworld. So, in its summer issue, ArtReview looks at our relationship with places – not as political entities, but as geographies and terrains.
What Drives the Enduring Popularity of Nancy Holt?
In the desert, Jenny Wu finds an example of art’s tunnel vision Driving from Salt Lake City to Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), one notices the Cowboy Bar & Cafe on the side of a narrow road that branches off the highway, winding its way up towards the ghost town of Lucin. As of late, the bar has been sporting a Trump 2024 banner on its marquee, and a sticker by the door reads, ‘I support my local police’.
The 14 Exhibitions to See in June 2026
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month – from Tokyo and Taiwan to London and Zürich Cubitt Gallery & Studios, Angel Mews. Photo: hahnchen. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons London The Hospitable Threshold It’s a depressingly familiar story: in January of this year, project space and studio provider Cubitt got notice that, after three decades on site, their lease would not be renewed later this year.
Art, Death, Duchamp
For an artist who treated the material status of his works with striking nonchalance, Duchamp in his afterlife seems rather preoccupied with asserting control over the material world During a roundtable discussion in 1957, Marcel Duchamp argued that art emerges from its maker ‘in a raw state’, that it must be refined by the spectator, ‘as pure sugar from molasses’. In the same talk, he coined the term ‘art coefficient’ to describe the gap between what an artist intends and what is realised.
What ‘Costume Art’ Gets Wrong About the Body
Theerratic management of art history in the Met’s latest exhibition is harmless compared to its quasi-taxonomic classification of humans The latest edition of the Costume Institute’s annual spring exhibition is an exercise in pattern recognition and analogy – and a real head-scratcher at that. The nearly 400-object show, whose stated aim is to ‘assert the central role of the dressed body in art throughout history’, presents its works in dyads.
The 2026 Venice Biennale Is Quintessential Biennial Art
Visually seductive, responsibly researched, culturally portable and diplomatic, In Minor Keys is a protest conducted with fine-print slogans and no concrete demands – and it’s increasingly lifeless, like a relic from a bygone era On a wall in the Arsenale hang pages from a 1922 play by Luigi Pirandello, the inspiration for American filmmaker Éric Baudelaire’s nearby five-channel video installation, Death Passed My Way and Stuck This Flower in My Mouth (2021), one of the works in the 61st...
Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Archivists and Activists
Prisoners of Love embodies Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s strategy of using art to frame and disseminate suppressed information Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom (2025), an hour-long four-channel film by New York- and Ramallah-based Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, plays in a dimly lit room lined with steel and concrete panels and suspended scrims.
Notes from New York: The World in a Convex Mirror
What, on the 50th anniversary of MoMA PS1, are we actually celebrating? In a spacious third-floor gallery in MoMA PS1, Covey Gong’s sculptures Shi (2026) and Jie (2026) – red fabric cut and stretched over stainless-steel scaffolds, in the shape of the Chinese characters for ‘world’ – were reflected in Win McCarthy’s Philosophy of Mind (2026), four security mirrors mounted on metal C-stands.
The 11 Exhibitions to See in May 2026
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month – everywhere but Venice Audie Murray. Gold Thread, 2026. Artist’s breast milk and heat on paper. 23.75 × 18 inches (26.75 x 21 inches framed). Courtesy of the artist, april april, Pittsburgh and Fazakas Gallery, Vancouver. Photo: JSP Art Photography.
Appropriation Culture: Richard Prince and Arthur Jafa
Who owns images? An upcoming exhibition pairing the artists puts appropriation and the issues around it on centre stage On the side of a road at night, Kametra Barbour walks backward with her hands raised above her head. When she comes within range of the police dashcam that is recording her, we hear the distress in her voice. “What is wrong?… My children – they’re six and eight,” she cries, as a small boy steps out of her parked car and moves timidly towards the cops, his hands raised too.
Notes from New York: Rotting Meat
From Jen Liu’s pounds of flesh to Josh Kline’s viral essay, it’s hard to escape the feeling that something is irreversibly decomposing There are four paintings on paper in Pound of Flesh, Jen Liu’s solo exhibition at Silverlens. Each depicts the back of a woman’s head, which seems composed not of bone, blood, brain and sensory organs but of the kinds of meat found in butcher shop windows.
The 9 Exhibitions to See in April 2026
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month, from Los Angeles to Seoul Edgar Calel, K’obomanik (Gratitude for everything that lights up and turns off before our eyes), 2024 (installation view at Bergen Kunsthall).
Whitney Biennial 2026 Review: The Revolution Will Be Cute
In darkening times, the New York institution’s flagship exhibition turns to the cute, the zany and the interesting. Is this move evasive, or even appropriate? Back in 2012, cultural theorist Sianne Ngai announced that the beautiful and the sublime had given way to the cute, the zany and the interesting – new aesthetic categories that reflect how we, as late-capitalist subjects, experience and evaluate visual culture.
Notes from New York: Independent Study
Arts education in US universities is interleaved with unhappy departures and uneasy participation. Could a model of self-paced, self-motivated study be the solution? In 1972 the German artist Joseph Beuys was dismissed from his teaching position at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf after repeatedly occupying university offices to advocate for applicants he believed should have been accepted. A photograph shows Beuys, all smiles, being marched out of the building by police.
The 9 Exhibitions to See in March 2026
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month, from New York to Hong Kong Hoda Afshar and Vernon Ah Kee, Code Black/Riot, 2025 (still), four-channel digital video, colour, sound, 33 min. Photo: Hoda Afshar. © and courtesy the artists. Courtesy Milani Gallery Sydney 25th Biennale of Sydney: Rememory ‘Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay,’ says Sethe, the formerly enslaved protagonist of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
The Lesser-Known Robert Rauschenberg
The Menil Collection gives centre stage to the proto-Pop star’s ‘minor’ fabric works There is an air of austerity to the nearly three dozen fabric works in the Menil Collection’s galleries, made by Robert Rauschenberg during the 1970s on blustery Captiva Island, Florida, where the formerly New York-based artist moved following his Castelli-finessed market success and award-winning Venice Biennale presentation.
Inside Édouard Glissant’s Art Collection
While his writings have become ubiquitous in contemporary art theorising, Glissant’s actual involvement with the artworld remains understudied During the early 1970s, Agustín Cárdenas carved Édouard Glissant, a narrow, charred and eerily biomorphic wood sculpture rising about one metre high.
Notes from New York: Writing into Oblivion
What can an American history of leftist zine distribution teach us in the era of ICE, MAGA and AI memes? Tucked away in a small room on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a zine library is packed with cardboard storage boxes piled high on spindly metal shelves. The sides of the bookstacks are covered in stickers that read ‘BRING ON THE FUCKING HATE’, ‘INVASIÓN’, ‘BLOWUPNIHILIST’.
The 10 Exhibitions to See in February 2026
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month, from London to Delhi Michael Joo, Crystal Noose, 1999, aluminium potassium sulfate crystals, flax rope, polycarbonate, aluminium, steel cable, glass, 80 x 18 x 18 in. Danny Moynihan Collection.
Notes from New York: Intimacy Post-#MeToo
We are living in a culture that treats sex – with all its latent violences – as a virtual object instead of an embodied experience This past December, a small audience gathered closely around four actors in a tiny loft near Union Square to watch New York-based artist Georgica Pettus’s Seconds Minutes Hours (2025), a stream-of-consciousness play set during the morning after a one-night stand.
Notes from New York: Child’s Play
The artist Lina Lapelytė’s commission for this year’s Performa Biennial certainly has emancipatory intentions. But is freedom ever a realistic aim of performance?
Is the Artworld Intelligent?
Defending connoisseurship, criticism and collective intelligence in the age of AI slop Bernhard Strigel, The Annunciation to Saint Anne, c. 1505–10, oil on panel, 58 × 30 cm.
Bagus Pandega’s Shrine to Experimentation
The artist’s first institutional presentation outside of Asia, at New York’s Swiss Institute, tells a story of industry, spirituality and postcolonial culture in spare parts The walls are seafoam green in one of the galleries of Bagus Pandega’s solo exhibition. Parked in the centre of the room is a custom drag-racing bike that Pandega, known as a tinkerer with a penchant for working-class aesthetics, built for the show using spare parts and an electric battery.
Chicago Exhibition Weekend: Over Your Head
The third annual CXW is a exercise in conceptualist and postconceptualist approaches A page from an issue of Art & Antiques published in 1990, the heyday of neoconceptualism, sits in a vitrine in Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984–2015, a ten-artist show that occupies two floors of a former office building in Chicago and serves as the flagship exhibition of the third annual Chicago Exhibition Weekend (CXW).
The Interview: Thelma Golden
Golden opened the floodgates for a generation of Black artists to just be themselves. Now, ahead of the Studio Museum’s reopening, the director speaks about shouldering the weight Before Thelma Golden became the Studio Museum in Harlem’s director and chief curator, she organised the 1993 Whitney Biennial, a politically conscious and ethnically diverse exhibition that was unafraid to, as The New York Times put it, ‘stick its neck out’.
The 10 Exhibitions to See in November 2025
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month, from Shanghai and Taipei to Guatemala City and Edinburgh New York City, United States Guanyu Xu: Resident Aliens When Guanyu Xu first applied for an EB-1 Green Card from the US government, he was rejected. He told me, during an interview in 2023, that on his second attempt his lawyer advised him to scrub his website of his project Resident Aliens (2019–present). His application was subsequently approved.
Review: Ren Light Pan at Lyles & King, New York | ArtReview
Referencing Duchamp and Donatello, the Chinese-American artist’s self-portraits decode the gestures and refusals of the nude Although this solo show of works by Chinese-American artist Ren Light Pan centres on nude self-portraits, it is marked less by a sense of exhibitionism than by an air of reticence. In many of her monumental ink portraits, Pan lifts a loose garment over her head, exposing her breasts and penis but obscuring her face.
The 10 Exhibitions to See in October 2025
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month, from London and Paris to Jakarta and Lagos Amsterdam Minor music at the end of the world In 1920, in the wake of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic and the 1919 ‘Red Summer’ of white supremacist violence across the US, writer and sociologist WEB DuBois published the apocalyptic short story ‘The Comet’.
Towards A World Of Reckless Abandon
An ambitious show at Sky High Farm stages beauty and despair in a backdrop of ecological uncertainty This eco-themed exhibition of over 50 international artists, installed on two floors of a decommissioned cold storage warehouse in Upstate New York, is dedicated to raising funds for the Dan Colen-founded regenerative farm Sky High Farm (SHF).
How Kerry James Marshall Restored Black Figures to the Western Canon
The ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement; Velázquezian references; Sleeping Beauty – it’s all there in Marshall’s monumental painted worlds ‘The figures in my paintings are not naturalistic in the conventional sense. They are rhetorical figures that inhabit a realist space,’ Kerry James Marshall told the art historian Benjamin Buchloh, ahead of the artist’s survey The Histories, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Gaza Biennial 2025 Review: Defiance Amid Devastation
This New York Pavilion of the decentralised biennial functions as ‘a final call’ To call an exhibition a biennial would imply a spectacle, but the latest iteration of the roving Gaza Biennale, installed at the Brooklyn not-for-profit space Recess and titled From Gaza to the World, is a modest affair. In the lobby a monitor plays a documentary featuring profiles of over a dozen of the 53 exhibiting artists, all of whom are from Gaza. Some are currently living under siege, others displaced.
The 10 Exhibitions to See in September 2025
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to this month, from the 36th Bienal de São Paulo to ‘Global Fascisms’ at HKW, Berlin 36th Bienal de São Paulo: Not All Travellers Walk Roads Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, São Paulo, 6 September 2025 – 11 January 2026 Faced with the Bienal de São Paulo’s notoriously tricky Oscar Niemeyer-designed pavilion (all wide open spaces, ramps and curves), Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, curator of the thirty-sixth edition, has turned to the idea of...
Notes from New York: Art Critics and Gangster Capitalism
The state of art criticism today resembles a crisis of freedom, where one reality has been rejected but another has yet to be conceived On a drizzly Wednesday evening in August, I joined a queue in front of KGB Bar in the East Village to attend a talk by the cultural theorist and University of California Irvine professor Catherine Liu. The programme, titled ‘Gangster Capitalism, Big Bosses, and New Turf Wars in the Class Struggle’, arose from Liu’s recent work on Hollywood gangster films.
The Interview: Cauleen Smith
“I was trained in semiotics, so even just a toilet paper commercial – if it racialises and genders hygiene – can drive me up the wall” When the Los Angeles-based filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith directed her debut feature, Drylongso (1998), she was a second-year MFA student at UCLA, where students were forbidden from shooting feature-length films for lack of experience; Drylongso quickly burned through its $35,000 budget – a grant Smith received from the Rockefeller Media...
The 10 Exhibitions to See in August 2025
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to this month, from Veronica Ryan and Aki Sasamoto to EVA International and Seoul Mediacity Biennale Veronica Ryan: Unruly Objects Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, 22 August 2025–11 January 2026 In the late 1950s, the Turner Prize-winning artist Veronica Ryan moved with her parents from the Caribbean island of Montserrat to the UK, as part of a wave of migrants known as the Windrush generation.
Notes from New York: The Garden
The idea of prehistory, with its glinting, uncontroversial promise of a shared origin, still seduces the artworld. Can it mean more than fantasy? ‘We are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is: How do we exit this car?’ So says Bruno Lacombe, a fictional cave-dwelling octogenarian in Rachel Kushner’s acclaimed eco-spy novel Creation Lake (2024).
Stephanie Comilang: The Condition of the Diasporic Subject
Amid travel bans and ICE raids, Comilang’s video installations at CARA, New York offer snapshots of migrants’ resilience Viewers may feel a distinct floating sensation in Stephanie Comilang’s solo exhibition An Apparition, A Song, for which the galleries on both floors of Center for Art, Research and Alliances have been converted into atmospheric black box viewing rooms.
Notes from New York: Free Sample
Our critic goes for a cryogenic facial in a Lower East Side gallery In June I got a facial in a Lower East Side gallery. It was part of Jo Shane’s solo presentation Lilies Into the Void. Shane’s perplexing exhibition at Blade Study featured an installation resembling an aesthetician’s office, which served as the backdrop of a performance series titled Seen/Unseen (2025).
The 10 Exhibitions to See in July 2025
Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to this month, from Rencontres d’Arles to a Michael Haneke retrospective Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles Arles, France, 7 July – 5 October Arles 2025 opens under the loaded theme of Disobedient Images and brings together over 60 presentations of works by photographers from around the world. But the disobedient bit doesn’t appear to be so much of the shouty kind.
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