EXHIBITIONSZero Degree of Image Vol. 1: Wu Di

START Museum will present the first artist case study of museum’s long-term experimental project “Zero Degree of Image”, featuring arrtist Wu Di. The exhibition will be on view at A Hall on the first floor of START Museum from August 13 through September 27, 2026.

This exhibition marks artist Wu Di’s first large-scale museum exhibition to date. As the first artist case study of the “Zero Degree of Image” project, Wu Di has, throughout her more than two decades of artistic practice and exploration, consistently used her works as experimental samples, seeking more contemporary and powerful artistic expressions within the transmission of images, the materialization of language, and the power relations of color. She freely navigates through images from the entire history of both Chinese and Western art, social news, and cultural communication, extracting the visual elements that she perceives as constituting symbolic power. (Here, her individual perception and understanding transcend the power judgments imposed by so-called art history and social reality.)

By removing their original cultural and historical contexts and resetting visual perception through pure image structures and color relationships, she attempts to establish a new sense of sacredness and power within images. Yet this “sacredness” and “power” are simultaneously provocative, illusory, and fleeting. They are torn apart by delicate brushstrokes, consumed by repeatedly layered colors, and dissolved by the intentionally preserved rough textures of the artist’s surfaces. Thus, Wu Di once again completes a deconstruction of another dimension of her own images.

Wu Di’s art is also characterized by an extremely chaotic and free approach to form. She never confines herself to any single medium or mode of expression; oil painting, sketches, collage, sculpture, installation, sound, and even light and shadow can all become methods through which she captures and constructs images. In this exhibition, she paints monumental oil paintings with the lightness of sketches, compelling viewers to pay attention to their delicate brushwork and tactile qualities. She collages classical art historical images onto wood panels, reconstructing compositions and backgrounds, allowing the classics to remain suspended within modern reproduction technologies while radiating a “sacred aura.” She also pioneeringly employs large areas of highly saturated colors, challenging the “symbolic violence of color” within consumer culture rather than following the logic of abstraction…
This time, as an artist, Wu Di consciously and forcefully confronts contemporary systems of power, the sacredness of art, and the logic of contemporary communication. Through this practice, she presents the powerful and fearless life attitude and intellectual depth of a female artist.