Jialin Wu
Jialin Wu (b. 2000) is a London-based, research-driven multimedia artist whose practice explores contemporary museography and transmedia storytelling, with a particular focus on the psychological and existential dimensions of death. Specializing in moving images and interactive installations, she creates immersive environments that investigate the delicate boundaries between life and death, memory and disappearance, presence and absence.
Wu constructs fragmented, speculative worlds that interweave archival logic, ecological metaphors, and non-linear narratives. Her works embrace systems of proliferation, decay, and recomposition, situating themselves within ontological liminality, spaces where the architecture of being is not fixed but in perpetual flux.
Jialin Wu’s An Almost-World (2025), presented at our gallery’s August exhibition, constructs a dreamscape that reimagines the possibilities of utopia, not as a concrete blueprint or final destination but as a gentle exercise in thought—a continuous imagining of places we have not yet reached. Inspired by Fredric Jameson’s concept of Utopia as Method, the work translates a critical framework into a sensory experience. Each floating particle in the moving image resembles a fragment of thought, a residue of hope suspended in a centerless space that forms structures both unstable and full of potential.
In Unfixed Coordinates (2024), Wu turns her attention to the shifting relationships between identity, memory, and cultural artefacts. Built upon four moving image sequences layered with intricate soundscapes, the work reframes historical objects as unstable coordinates, fluid points through which personal and collective positions may be questioned, reoriented, and reimagined. Situated in a space of ontological liminality, Unfixed Coordinates resists singular truths and encourages the viewer to drift across temporal, material, and perceptual layers. Here, identity emerges not as a fixed origin but as a process of continual repositioning within the echoes of what remains.
Wu’s ongoing engagement with environmental discourse comes to the fore in Eternal Trace (2024), a contemplative video piece that examines “the way we see ourselves in the world, and how we think about our place in it.”
Through a meditative cycle of flushing and repetition, the work captures the paradox of human choice: to remain willfully blind to environmental degradation or to confront and reconnect with the consequences of our existence. The monologue woven into the piece drifts between flesh, memory, and time, dissolving the lines between self and world until all that remains is the trace of our movement through it.
Across these works, Wu weaves together sensory engagement, speculative narration, and subtle disruptions of expectation, inviting audiences into immersive spaces where identity, memory, and ecological consciousness are in constant flux. Her art does not resolve; instead, it offers an ongoing dialogue, between the viewer and the world, between what has been lost and what might still be imagined.
The colours are light yet purposeful, the rhythm slow yet never static. Through the interplay of sound and image, the work evokes a mood of near-articulation, like an unspoken wish on a summer afternoon or an unfinished childhood game. Rather than proposing a model for an ideal society, An Almost-World invites viewers to let go of the anxiety of “realisation” and to retrain their imaginative capacities, treating the “utopian impulse” as an open, drifting force for reassembling the forgotten fragments of hope within a fractured present.