Shuwen Wang

Biography

Shuwen Wang is pursuing a practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London. Prior to her current research, she completed a postgraduate degree in Fine Art Painting at Camberwell College of Arts. Her art is based on interdisciplinary practice, with a focus on painting which serves as the present main approach.

Her art practice unfolds across feminism, poetic/semiotic experience, and the spiritual dimension, interrogating the boundaries of memory and the ways in which bodily perception is contoured and constrained within social and institutional structures. Operating between Northeast China and London, her work is perpetually informed by the structural impacts of these disparate geographical contexts—a duality that transcends mere cultural difference to address the institutional constitution of bodily experience and the modes of perception.

Inspired by historical narratives of the witch-hunt, her practice interrogates the metaphor of the ‘modern witch-hunt’ within contemporary society, seeking to understand how the ‘New Witch’ positionality—forged within Global South contexts—functions as a mode of existence for marginalised subjectivities. Utilising an artistic methodology predicated on embodied experience, she reconstructs archives and narratives regarding the relationality of nature, the feminine, and the non-human, thereby addressing the social simulacra of identity, gender, and the conceptual ‘witch’ itself.

Shuwen has participated in numerous international exhibitions and public projects alongside conducting workshop-based practices; her collaborations include institutions such as South London Gallery, ST.ART Gallery, Yue+ Space, Koppel Project, Ritan Park, and Acute Angle Gallery, among others.

She regards her artistic practice as the vital trajectory for responding to and synthesising her research; here, praxis serves both as a mode of knowledge production and as a fundamental constituent of her practice-led doctoral research.

Position at UAL:
Shuwen concurrently serves as the CCW Postgraduate Research Student Representative and is a member of the Subjectivity and Feminisms Research Group.