Wenwen Deng is a London-based artist working across experimental film and painting. Her practice investigates tourism as a condition of perception: a way of seeing that is already routed, timed, desired and implicated. She treats the tourist position as both method and narrative structure. Her films build fictional dimensions of perception from managed ecosystems, daily infrastructures, religious sites and historical residues. Sounds, gestures, rhythms and material traces travel across locations, connecting scenes through recurrence rather than linear causality.
Her paintings extend this research into matter, they hold the moment when perception becomes material. Drawn from the same journeys, they begin with encounters the camera cannot fully hold: smell, pressure, dampness, dust, submersion and bodily contact with surface. Working with sand, flock fibre, plaster, mineral pigments, kaolin and bone glue, she lets earth-derived materials flow, settle, crack, stain and absorb. The paintings follow the logic of tsupu, a Quichua ideophone for a body plunging into water: meaning made through contact, as one body enters another, leaves a mark and changes state.
2026 — ART MATTERS 17, Online Group Show, Galerie Biesenbach, Cologne, Germany
2026 — Hidden field: the unbeheld, Group Exhibition, Manjinghua Art Museum, Shenzhen, China
2026 — Amazonica Artists-in Residence, Correlación Contemporánea, Iquitos, Peru
2026 — Miaoko Art Residency, Miaoko Hostel, Hualien, Taiwan
2026 — MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE, Video Art Festival, KC Grad, Belgrade, Serbia
2026 — Don't Mirror Back, Group Exhibition, Koppel Collective, London, UK
2026 — Digital Trace, Group Exhibition, Sisters Room, Tbilisi, Georgia
2025 — Formless, Group Exhibition, Zhongfangjiao Gallery, 798 Art Zone, Beijing, China
2025 — Grey with a Glimmer, Group Exhibition, Indra Gallery, London, UK
2025 — MANIFEST:IO & IKLECTIK, Group Exhibition & Electronic Art Symposium, St James Hatcham Church, London, UK
2025 — Sanctspaces: Spaces of the Sublime, Arts and Cultural Management Conference Exhibition, Vienna, Austria
2025 —STRATA (149 art), residency & Group exhibition, Karamay, Xinjiang, China
2025 — 26th Advanced Imaging International Festival, Seoul, Korea
2025 — CSM X Academy Moving Image Award, shortlisted
2024 — The World Hath Aged Whilst Humanity Is Fledgling, Group Exhibition, M. P. Birla Millennium Gallery, London, UK
2024 — ING Discerning Eye, Group Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London, UK
2024 — Stained, Group Exhibition, PM/AM Gallery Basement, London, UK
2024 — Phoebe Llewellyn Smith Award, Central Saint Martins