Yudi Wu is an Exeter-based artist whose practice is engaged in deep community-led live-art work. Yudi’s practice spans multimedia formats, creating generous spaces for vulnerability, connection, and resistance among queer, migrant, and neurodiverse ecologies. Their work thoughtfully navigates the complexities and contradictions of presenting a layered, cross-border art practice within the UK context.
We had the privilege of interviewing Yudi and are excited to share their insightful responses, offering a glimpse into the many threads of their in-person and digital approaches to live art and community work.
performingborders: Yudi, your “I MUST ALWAYS FUNCTION” delves into the intersections between private physicality and digital performativity of the self. In this work, you center your experience with ADHD and the medical treatments available in the UK, using live art as your medium. Can you share more about how the in-person, digital, private, and public spheres are interwoven in this project?
Yudi Wu: I’ve done two iterations of the “I MUST ALWAYS FUNCTION” so far – one at the Barnfield Theatre in Exeter where the physical and virtual me each occupied a corner within the same room, and the other on Twitch where the physical and virtual me on screen side-by-side with each other. But I think the point of that is not really about having a contrast between the messy physical me and the perfect virtual me – in fact there were a lot of intentional designs around making sure that this contrast couldn’t be kept up. For example, I’ve specifically made it a whole day thing knowing that I would become extremely overwhelmed and irritated as the day went, and the virtual me would gradually go from all cheerful and bubbly to full of negativity. So I suppose it’s more about visualising how those supposedly separate spheres are constantly collapsing. And that’s also the case with placing that messiest me in the theatre, being so out of place in this ✨art✨ space and getting confused glances or side-eyes. Or, in the case of Twitch, being essentially a “Vtuber” who, instead of embodying their perfect persona and fantasy, bluntly demonstrates the unpleasant version of themselves.
While this work is primarily linked with the ADHD masking experience, it’s certainly also inspired by masking across many different contexts and experiences. As most of the artists’ stories go, I was an outcast growing up and I was bullied a lot. But things changed drastically as I started high school (around 15/16 years old), where I literally applied the characteristics of this likeable, inoffensive anime character to my day-to-day performance of self. It might sound like a cringe idea – but it really worked and I became one of the most popular kids at school. I kept that persona for a year and a bit more until I eventually collapsed – clinically depressed and couldn’t attend school. Of course, that wasn’t the sole cause but it definitely had a big factor there. I was aware that I couldn’t always keep up the act, but I thought that I’d be fine as long as I separate my private self from my public persona, Hannah Montana style. A very important thing I’ve learned from here is to understand how everything is always connected. Attempts to separate, divide and deconstruct things into dichotomy can push you (at least, me) to terrible places. That’s also definitely relevant to my interests in tech, especially highlighting the connection between the digital and the physical space within my work, including but not limited to how our digital self constructs our physical self and vice versa.
But I’ve also started to accept that this is a lifelong process that I’ll have to constantly return to. For example, I caught myself doing it again with my ADHD medicine, where I started to think that I was useless without it. In a way, I made this work to forcefully display many things I’ve been feeling embarrassed about (or, to be exact, made to feel embarrassed about) and attempted to keep private – my negativity, my East Asian cultural influence, and my love for cute and pink things. And that is, not just challenging my private self in an ‘it’s okay not to be okay’ manner, but a two-way process, also challenging the public by questioning what and why we see as okay and not okay, embarrassing and not embarrassing in the first place.
performingborders: As a creative producer at the Devon Ukrainian Association, you frequently collaborate with refugee and immigrant groups, many of whom are children, young people, and elders facing language barriers and adjusting to life as newcomers in Exeter. As an artist, in workshops such as “What is VTubing and How Do I Make It Gay?”, you encouraged participants to imagine and reimagine Bristol’s queer ecology by creating their own VTuber characters. How does your work with these communities influence your performative practice? And, how do you see yourself as a live artist connected to your local communities and ecologies?
Yudi Wu: It’s all reflexive. I’ve come to realize that we community arts practitioners are all huge people pleasers – and interestingly some would say people pleasers are actually the biggest narcissists. I certainly agree with that in the way that I started to notice how community-based work has become a very important ground for me to become more honest and confident with myself and my work. I work exclusively with queer people, immigrants, people from global majority backgrounds, and people with neurodiversity/disability in community-based work. Partially because it’s important and I do work the best with them – but another part of it is selfishness, or, to be exact, me trying to become more selfish with my work. I always loved performance/live art and I always wanted to get into it, but I didn’t start doing it until the summer of 2024 – and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t start my career in a community-based arts organisation. My answers here are quite wordy but, the majority of the time, I’ve been a person who’s very anxious about taking too much space or saying too much – because why would anyone care about what I have to say? Working with people like me, however, has helped me realise that my experiences and feelings are valid. And it made me realize the importance of saying those things that I want to say.
In spring 2024, we (Maketank & Devon Ukrainian Association) did an 8-week community arts project called IMMERGE, with a group of young people from various immigrant and global majority backgrounds in Exeter. It was a really important project for me as it was the first time that I produced and led something on this scale – but also because… it was really important for me. They were all aged 13-18 – I really struggled in those years and I’m still dealing with the aftermath, one of them being this thought that I’m not enough, or I’m not allowed as a creative/artist. And that’s a very common and real pain amongst immigrants. Seeing those young people blossom in their creative process is like meeting myself in those years again and re-parenting myself, telling my younger self “You’re creative and you’re allowed to talk about it”. That definitely led me to, a few months later, my first live art piece, ‘Save the Raccoon’ – a game show about a Raccoon (not native to the UK) going through a funding and award system designed for badgers, weasels and skunks (native British wildlife).
Exeter, and all these ‘small places’ are very interesting places to be as an immigrant. (Some might argue that Exeter is not ‘small’ due to its university – but I want to say it’s a very different city once you graduate.) I don’t think enough attention is being paid to the increasing number of immigrants, especially refugee/displaced people in the UK’s rural areas. The image of a white rural idyll has led people to overlook the experiences of immigrants in these places – but I think it’s important to remember that just because anti-immigrant riots didn’t occur in these places, it doesn’t mean that discrimination and barriers are any less severe or complex. It’s from the inside as well, where all the marginalisation and isolation have been swept under this big rug of ‘but everyone is welcome here and Exeter has always voted for Labour.’ It’s that feeling when you walk into a local pub and all their regulars just suddenly go silent.
So I’m currently making this performance/intervention called “Clink on the Moor (Chink on the Moor)”, which features me going around Dartmoor shaking a folded drying rack in nature like I’m shaking a metal gate, making a clinking sound, documented as a microfilm. I decided to make it after I went to RAMM’s (a museum in Exeter) Dartmoor exhibition – it was a great exhibition but none of the work resonated with me. Also I was called a “chink” the other day on Exeter high street. It’s taking up space, occupying the physical places & artistic spaces where you wouldn’t usually expect a chink. But more importantly, what I want to highlight is this weird relationship where I want to be let in and accepted, but also not knowing if I want to belong to a place where nothing makes me feel I belong. I used to use the word ‘integration’ a lot in the context of socially engaged work – but the more I worked with other immigrants around here, the more I decided to move away from that word. And that’s recognising my own truth too, because I don’t want to be represented by EDI stock images. I want (us) to be seen, and I want (us) to be seen on the moor looking out of place while shaking the drying rack.
performingborders: Your work focuses on exploring local contexts while amplifying the voices of those often unheard, as well as constantly looking at themes and lived experiences of queerness, immigration, neurodiversity, and what it means to be an artist. The richness and contribution of your body of work and research is already impressive and we are curious about how you plan to develop these threads in your upcoming projects.
Yudi Wu: A lot of education that I’ve received growing up is around not taking up too much space, which is then reinforced in my experience where I feel constantly out of place. So I think spatial relationship is one of the most (if not the most) fundamental elements within everything that I look at. I believe spaces and places are such an important, yet often ignored part of that entire puzzle of intersectionality. I only found out a few months ago that a lot of Chinese people around my age didn’t actually have this experience growing up where some of their female classmates would just randomly disappear. I was born and raised in a small town surrounded by many deprived villages, where a lot of girls were forced out of education at a very young age to work or have kids. Not long after, I went to this student exhibition at Exeter School, where I met a group of students who could confidently come up with their own work, also at a very young age, supported by a system and a level of resources I didn’t even know existed.
Honestly, I have no clue how I can possibly translate such a difference in lived experiences and inequality on this level into my work. But I must tell you this story. It’s not just a story about how unfair the world is, but more importantly, how those disappeared girls from my class could have shined. My 2025 started with an amazing revelation while reading Transcommunality by John Brown Childs. As early as 2003, he pointed out how mass communication, especially in the digital age, will start breaking us into ‘atomized parts of “mass culture”, with capitalist homogenizing forces using the diversity of our social identity and lived experience to divide and prevent us from forming resistance. But the part that I liked the most was when he said there’s still hope – we don’t disavow the differences in our identities and experiences, instead we need to connect them to make sense of the system. Through the formation of ‘interpersonal ties’ in ‘shared practical action,’ we can start to cooperate and resist.
I never liked how sometimes I felt like my practice was just stacking diversity cards. It’s also inevitable because I am a walking stack of diversity cards, but I don’t want to be seen as that because I’m afraid the system will appropriate it against me. However, I’ve started to realize that I have the choice to use it as a power of resistance, bridging different communities and bringing together different stories through my identities and lived experiences. Whether it’s our diversity or technology, we have the choice to use the tools of our oppressors for ourselves, to connect, to organise, to take space. I have many more of those stories that I want to tell. And I want to try my best to make it possible for many others to tell even more of those stories.
Yudi describes themself as both a ‘hyper-local Community Arts Practitioner’, and an ‘extremely online Creative Technologist’. Their practice is multifaceted, actively connecting Socially Engaged/Community Arts and Creative Technology to challenge the norms in both fields. With interactivity and accessibility as the underpinning theme of Yudi’s work, Yudi has produced, curated and led exhibitions, festivals, and other highly participatory arts & cultural events as a Creative Producer. This later extended into community arts projects, in collaboration with organisations such as Take A Part, Maketank, and Devon Ukrainian Associations. Yudi has been working with The Lit Platform to create visuals and interactive experiences using projection, AR, and the web, leading the art direction of their latest issue, Glitch. With commissioned projects exploring queerness and neurodiversity, Yudi’s work often uses tech-enabled live interactive approaches and internet culture to engage and co-create with audiences. In 2023, Yudi was shortlisted by Arebyte’s Hotel Generation 23/24. Yudi is also a trustee at Devon Arts In Schools Initiative (DAISI), where they advocate for integrating tech in their work with school absentees and the evaluation process.
Featured image credits: Immerge. Courtesy of the artist.