Yi Meng Wu – design for encounters

In the beginning, there is emptiness, the white paper. “From here, the ideas unfold and later the works of art,” Yi Meng Wu says. Ten years ago, she founded the “Studio Wu 無” in Berlin, which specializes in intercultural design. The Chinese character in the name represents this emptiness, the beginning of each of her works.

“Ever since I was three, I’ve been drawing and painting” – as a child, Yi Meng lived with her family on the outskirts of Shanghai for several years. Art was omnipresent in the family. Her mother, Lili Yuan, is a painter of Chinese ink painting. When Yi Meng was nine, the family moved to Germany, to the Ruhr area in Bochum. Her parents were curious about what life would be like outside China. “There were many academics in China in the nineties who moved abroad to study and work,” Yi Meng reports. “Culturally and especially aesthetically, Bochum was, of course, completely new and different.”