John Ziqiang Wu

John Ziqiang Wu (b. 1983, Tangshan, China) is an artist and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design in 2013 and his MFA in Photo/Media from the California Institute of the Arts in 2017. Wu is the co-founder of Learning Art & Art Learning Studio, an art tutoring workshop he has run with his wife, Yinan, in Chino, California since 2014. Wu’s work has been included in group exhibitions at SALT, Istanbul (2018); and Pasadena Museum of California Art (2010). He also performed alongside Asher Hartman in ANNIE OKAY at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010). Wu has published several artist books, including The Place and The People; The Lamps’ Story; and Dad’s Hands Are Smaller (all 2018); and Learning Art and Art Learning Society (2017), which was also translated into Turkish as part of the exhibition Bureau of Unspecified Services at SALT in Istanbul. Wu will use the Hammer residency to engage with the daily activities of the museum and its staff. Through an observational process that translates his experiences into numerous watercolors and drawings, Wu’s interests are in the moments of overlap between institutional and personal experience. His practice as a whole reflects on the various models of art learning and pedagogy across different contexts and cultures in order to explore what art can be and how it can function in daily life.