Helen Hu Ji Wu Spotlight
Berlin 10–26 Sept 2026
Spotlight brings together two emerging artistic positions by Helen Hu and Ji Wu. The exhibition places their distinct approaches in a shared context and focuses on an open dialogue between two independent perspectives.
Helen Hu (born 1994 in Augsburg) is a German-Chinese painter whose work operates at the intersection of gestural abstraction, process-based image-making, and questions of perception. She studied New Media Art at the Beijing Film Academy and painting at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and now lives and works in Berlin.
Emerging from an initially cross-media practice, Hu has developed a painterly language in which line, color field, and gesture do not function as stable signs but unfold their effect only in relation to one another. Her paintings move between concentration and dissolution, between spatial openness and an emphasis on surface. In this sense, they can be situated within a younger strand of abstract painting that understands the image less as a closed statement than as an open structure developed through process.
A defining feature of her work is the visibility of the painting process itself: layers, revisions, and gestures both asserted and withdrawn remain embedded in the structure of the image. Hu combines physical immediacy with compositional precision, creating works in which meaning is not fixed but formed in the act of looking.
Ji Wu presents works from his painting series Mitsein, which addresses human existence as a fundamentally relational condition. For him, the point of departure is not the isolated subject, but an understanding of the self as something continuously shaped through encounters with other people, cultures, memories, spaces, and the world. Shaped by his experience between China and Europe, Ji Wu explores identity not as a fixed state, but as something open and mutable. In his paintings, architectural fragments, sculptures, human figures, and angel motifs meet within layered pictorial spaces. Real experiences, memories, dream states, and imagination overlap without following a linear narrative. The angels do not appear as religious symbols, but rather as witnesses, companions, or protectors. Ji Wu’s painting makes visible not so much stories as states of being, asking how a being-with the unfamiliar might be imagined and represented.
Ji Wu, born 1994 in (Beijing) China, has been studying Fine Arts in Jorinde Voigt’s class at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg since 2023. From 2016 to 2021, he worked as a stage painter at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in China. Prior to that, he completed a BA in Stage Art at the Central Academy of Drama in China from 2012 to 2016.
Helen Hu (born 1994 in Augsburg) is a German-Chinese painter whose work operates at the intersection of gestural abstraction, process-based image-making, and questions of perception. She studied New Media Art at the Beijing Film Academy and painting at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and now lives and works in Berlin.
Emerging from an initially cross-media practice, Hu has developed a painterly language in which line, color field, and gesture do not function as stable signs but unfold their effect only in relation to one another. Her paintings move between concentration and dissolution, between spatial openness and an emphasis on surface. In this sense, they can be situated within a younger strand of abstract painting that understands the image less as a closed statement than as an open structure developed through process.
A defining feature of her work is the visibility of the painting process itself: layers, revisions, and gestures both asserted and withdrawn remain embedded in the structure of the image. Hu combines physical immediacy with compositional precision, creating works in which meaning is not fixed but formed in the act of looking.
Ji Wu presents works from his painting series Mitsein, which addresses human existence as a fundamentally relational condition. For him, the point of departure is not the isolated subject, but an understanding of the self as something continuously shaped through encounters with other people, cultures, memories, spaces, and the world. Shaped by his experience between China and Europe, Ji Wu explores identity not as a fixed state, but as something open and mutable. In his paintings, architectural fragments, sculptures, human figures, and angel motifs meet within layered pictorial spaces. Real experiences, memories, dream states, and imagination overlap without following a linear narrative. The angels do not appear as religious symbols, but rather as witnesses, companions, or protectors. Ji Wu’s painting makes visible not so much stories as states of being, asking how a being-with the unfamiliar might be imagined and represented.
Ji Wu, born 1994 in (Beijing) China, has been studying Fine Arts in Jorinde Voigt’s class at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg since 2023. From 2016 to 2021, he worked as a stage painter at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in China. Prior to that, he completed a BA in Stage Art at the Central Academy of Drama in China from 2012 to 2016.
Artists
- Helen Hu
- Ji Wu