Salomé Wu

Often created through an imprint in her mind, the surreal symbolism is effervescently reflected through fairy-tale hues of pinks and blues where true escapism lies. Salomé describes her painting language as an exploration towards a concept where ‘you are no longer restricted by the parameters of language or labelling that allow you to move away from attaining fixed ideas.’

 

The theatricality of her subject matter and heightened notions of transience are overtly drawn from the artist’s powerful engagement with Romanticism. Salomé, herself has stated she hopes her paintings’ ‘capture the moment when things feel on the edge of bursting’ – a nod to the Romantic idea of the sublime, specifically when artists externalise the impermanence and fragility of life. Utopian motifs such as adjourned figures in a state of nirvana or lonesome celestial flowers orbit the canvas, taken from an ongoing poem by Salomé where the text acts as a vehicle for the artist to personify her own emotions. It is also from this personal and private text that the titles of her paintings arrive allowing the spectator a peripheral snippet into the artist’s psyche.

 

Salomé, who grew up between Beijing, Tokyo and Singapore, notes her unusual upbringing in the presence of a highly religious Grandmother who devoted herself to Christianity. Later, she studied varying religious practices immersing herself in philosophy although she has never considered herself to be part of an organised religion. Rather, it is the essence of spirituality, alongside the experience of continual displacement that seeps through her art practice where repetitive motifs lend to the ideals of mysticism. It is the concept ‘The Children of the Universe’ that she finds relatable where the representation of the otherworldly is her own search for emotional fulfilment and painting is the artist’s physicalisation of abstract emotions that are at the core existence of relationships among humans.