Wu Mali

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Mali Wu (; born 1957) is a Taiwanese artist, writer, and activist working with social practice and conceptual art. She has been described as the godmother' of Taiwan's socially engaged art" by artist and art writer Zheng Bo.

Biography Early career Wu completed her undergraduate degree in German language and literature at Tamkang University in 1979. She enrolled at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria in 1980, but transferred to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany, where she studied sculpture under Günther Uecker and Klaus Rinke from 1982 to 1986.

1995-1999 In 1995, Wu took part in a group exhibition Balanceakte in the Ifa-Galerie Bonn of the Instituts für Auslandsbeziehungen. In the same year she represented Taiwan at the 46th Venice Biennale (Palazzo delle Prigioni) with the installation Library (1995). In this work, she shredded Chinese and Western literary classics and then placed the shredded material into acrylic boxes labeled with the original book title. After interviewing female textile workers, Wu was inspired to create Stories of Women from Hsinchuang (1997),

2000-Present Since the 1990s she has produced a series of projects and criticized the state of social and political affairs from a feminist perspective in her works. Parallel to her practice, she led the translation of two important texts, Suzanne Lacy's Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art and Grant Kester's Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, into Chinese.

From 2000 to 2004, Wu worked with the Taipei Awakening Association (TAA). After understanding the impact that the Awakening from Your Skin series had on a group of female textile workers, Wu decided to transform her practice into being more socially engaged. and co-curator of the 11th Taipei Biennial with Francesco Manacorda. The Biennial was focused on environmental issues, showing how socio ecological concerns have become a focus of Taiwan, especially in response to the referendum of November 24. Wu and Manacorda curated a multi-media exhibition featuring works such as Zheng Bo’s “Pteridophilia” and Julian Charrière’s An Invitation to Disappear. Both works touched on her socioecological theme.

Awards Art as Environment—A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek (jointly produced with Bamboo Curtain Studio) won the Taishin Arts Award in 2013, the most prestigious art prize in Taiwan.

In 2016 Wu won the 19th National Award of Art.

Literature Alvau, Roberto Riccardo. "Labor, Marginalization, Taiwanization: Mapping the Embodiment of the Being-Woman in Post-Martial Taiwan Through Wu Mali’s Stories of Women from Hsin-Chuang". In: Embodied Entanglements: Gender, Identity, and the Corporeal in Asia. Eds. Halina Zawiszová, Giorgio Strafella, Martin Lavička, Vol. 3, (2025): 437–457. . doi:10.5507/ff.25.24465821. Alvau, Roberto Riccardo. "(De)Centering Towards Where? Exploring Ecofeminist Infiltration And Wu Mali’s Influence On Institutional Dynamics In Taiwanese Contemporary Art”. In Espacios de Arte y Género. Colección Àgora Feminista. Eds. Marta Alonso Castanedo, Vol. 4, (2023): 155–170. . Katy Deepwell: Mali Wu. A Profile. In: n.paradoxa. International Feminist Art Journal. Ed. Katy Deepwell, Vol. 5, November 1997, , S. 45–53. (English)

Tung Wei Hsiu "When Social Practice Art Overcomes Globalisation: Attending to Environment and Locality in Taiwan" Culture and Dialogue 6, (2018) 223–250.