The series “docile_body” reflects Wu Jiaru’s ongoing inquiry into the relationship between corporeality and structures of power. The title draws on Michel Foucault’s notion of the “docile body”, a body shaped and regulated through systems of discipline.

In these paintings, the body rarely appears as a stable figure. Forms merge, melt, and multiply. Human and animal silhouettes overlap into unstable hybridities that refuse categorization, embodying the body as a contested site of power, instinct, and collective history.

Created through automatic drawing, these works suspend rational control, foregrounding intuition as a counter-method to disciplinary visual regimes. Figures emerge gradually through layers of gestural marks and color fields, assembling fragments of visual memory, creating what might be described as a contemporary mythos constructed from bodily gestures.