Yu-Hsuan Wu is a Taiwanese poet, curator, and arts educator. She studied butoh in Japan and graduated from the Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (USA), and is currently pursuing a doctorate in art at the University of Lapland in Finland, within the Arctic Circle. She is the author of 13 books, including Exchanging Lovers’ Ribs, Longing for the Infinite, and Carrying My Homeland with Me. Her work has earned her artist residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute (USA), Jane St. Art Center (New York), and La Porte Peinte (France). Wu currently serves as the Artistic Director of Born in Obsession 走向刀鋒, a contemporary cultural laboratory that invites people to explore both the body of poetry and the poetry of the body.
As a reader and critic, she is concerned with how the “gaze” within narrative frameworks confers meaning upon things, and with how, in tracing this gaze of meaning, a perceptual space is created within speech where emotion reverberates and semantic sense dissolves. As a creator, she practices speaking, like an early human, of what she sees, loves, and has lost. As an arts educator, she builds poetic ritual spaces through courses and workshops, awakening the desire to be alive. She believes that the questions of life can only answer themselves through the deepest emotions at the most delicate moments. As a nomad who takes the world as her home, she longs to lead undercurrents to the surface—the intimacy between human beings and all things is the trust that in nature there is a path that leads to you, and in you there is also a path that belongs to nature.