Bachelor of Fine Art Fine Art MADA Now 2022

Cam Wu

camdenwu@gmail.com↗

Cam Wu is a Chinese-Australian artist living and working on Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung land. Her practice is underpinned by an interest in ritual and narrative, bringing together broader histories and personal stories. Balancing playful humour and a deeply research-informed practice, she uses gestures underscored by a poetic sensibility to communicate sociohistorical connections.

Les Kossatz Memorial Award

$5000 prize

Hyphenated Projects Award

Hyphenated Projects funded residency program, including $1,500 stipend and materials fee

What Day? (video still)

What Day?' traces the continuity between the playground rituals of childhood and the mundane routines of adult life. The artist re-enacts a game from her own childhood, investigating the role of play in social connection and learning at all stages of human development. Comprising the simple act of twisting an apple until its stem breaks off, while naming a day of the week with each turn, this activity continues to come to mind even in adulthood. Indeed, games that appear to have been lost to childhood resurface as persistent memories in adulthood, adding an indulgent sense of satisfaction and bittersweet nostalgia to even the most mundane of routines.

Fiat Money (video still)

Through the repeated gesture of inserting tanbark into the coin slots of various machines and objects, the video references the common childhood practice of using tanbark as imaginary currency. Drawing from the artist’s own memories of using tanbark as a playground substitute for money, the video points to the parallels between childhood rituals and ‘adult’ society – what is so different between the pretend-tanbark-money at the playground, and our official plastic banknotes and coins? In both cases, objects with little to no intrinsic value become something precious through a collective game of pretend; a shared suspension of reality.

'Transliteral (one of four videos from the series)'

Transliteral' is a series of action-based videos. Each video in the series is centred around a different Chinese idiom, however, instead of focusing on their metaphorical senses, the videos depict enactments of the idioms’ literal translations. For example, 吃土 (chī tǔ) is a colloquial Chinese expression meaning "to be poor", but its literal translation is "eating dirt". As a result, 'Transliteral' presents a comically straightforward performance of the artist eating a handful of dirt. The series is situated within the wider context of immigrant histories, investigating diverse modes of information transmission and meaning-making within the constraints of linguistic and cultural barriers.

View full video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKsZqhY218E