Yuwei Tu
While staying at a rural monastery in Southern California, New York–based artist Yuwei Tu came upon a broken spiderweb laced with dewdrops on her daily meditative walk. She took a photograph, which quietly weaves through this gathering of soft paintings, diagrammatic drawings pressed into beeswax-yellow encaustic panels, and cast objects. In Here is the house., her first New York solo exhibition, Tu works in a lineage of artists, Eva Hesse and Doris Salcedo among them, who locate psychological feeling in matter without reducing it to personal meaning, letting the certainty of form fall away like words of a sentence collapsing on themselves. The exhibition picks up a thread spun by Louise Bourgeois, for whom the spider was an archetype of the mother. Tu’s constellation of objects and images follows this logic: if the spider is the mother, the web is the home.
At the center of the show is A nest, a home, a cage, a web (2026), a triptych that takes the torn web as a figure for absence and presence. In the first two panels, the web appears as a dark line on a pale, bruised ground, then inverted, white on black, like a negative held up to the light. The third builds encaustic into a thick skin of wax and metal, partially scorched and protected by chicken wire, its hexagonal mesh echoing the web while introducing another kind of enclosure, one that can protect as readily as it can confine.
Elsewhere, the body itself becomes the web, the home one lives inside. Heart’s Roots draws on an anatomical image Tu encountered at the Yale Medical Library, a figure rendered as a branching network of arteries. In thin layers of pale oil, the vessels become both a shimmering organic scaffolding and the bars of a cage. Confinement extends to a rusted-steel relief whose curved rods close around a small block of wood like ribs, or reach inward like a claw. Elsewhere the show adopts the material poetics of dispersal and loss. Spills collected from a metal shop floor appear in wax panels as found, disintegrating forms: a silver splash, twisted at the neck like a pomegranate, sits beside its etched double, a ghostly afterimage of that old emblem of fertility. Along the gallery wall and floor, wax casts of oversized bubble wrap spread like a vacant growth or honeycomb, and reappear inside a wooden cabinet with a chicken-wire facade.
The house appears most literally in a small block of pine, cut to a gabled profile and set inside an acrylic vitrine. Wax casts of a peach pit rest atop the case. Only by crouching and turning toward the wall does one find a pewter cast of the same pit, pressed against the side of the little house like something hidden or kept. Where Bourgeois often built her houses and spiders at human or monumental scale, Tu’s objects are intimate and provisional, closer to a scattering of remains, or a keepsake.