MONUMENTAL AND ETHEREAL, THE “NATURAL SENSITIVITY” OF YU WEN-FU

| by Elena Redaelli |

In Pingtung, wind is a constant presence. At the sites of the Luo Shan Feng Arts Festival, gusts arrive suddenly and relentlessly, slipping through narrow streets, under shop shutters, and into the cracks of old houses facing the coast. It was there that I first saw one of Yu Wen-Fu’s woven bamboo works in progress: an organic membrane of culms and slats wrapping around the surviving walls, embracing the architecture’s voids and making the wind’s direction visible.

This relationship between place, structure and air is a hallmark of his practice. It runs through the Taiwanese artist’s work from his early projects to his large-scale installations. Yet, as he himself recounts, it begins much earlier, in a small town in central Taiwan, in Nantou County.

“In Zhushan, my father was in charge of a factory that produced bamboo craft objects,” he recalls. “From childhood (1971 to 1983), I lived surrounded by a great variety of woven baskets. Inside the factory, piles of bamboo were processed into slats and then turned into baskets. That was my everyday life. Even though I was still a child, by carefully observing all the stages of production, how the different departments divided up the tasks and finally put everything together to obtain the finished product, it became natural for me to understand the material and the techniques to work with it.”

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