Born in the vast plains of the Liao River in northeastern China, Weiyu Dou (窦唯毓) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher. From the perspective of a young Asian woman, she conducts an autobiographical study that transforms the self into matter, often categorized as "Men" and "Behind Me." Her research delves into the dissonance within cross-cultural and geographical romantic relationships, as well as the gender and racialized bodily privileges. By caring for and revealing the truths and inequalities faced by women in transnational intimate experiences, she redirects the energy of natural matter with imaginative configurations. She also focuses on the roots and connections with her homeland, challenging the linear relationship of memory and fate in departures, encounters, returns, and reshaping timelines. Her installations, paintings, and performances express the emotional and gender rights identity issues encouraged by young women leaving their homes in a state of geographic mobility, as well as the inequalities in intimate relationships in an unprotected state within the context of economic globalization.

Her research is driven by concerns for contemporary young vulnerable women exploring unfamiliar environments and the unforeseen impacts on emotional well-being rights structures following the moments of establishing romantic relationships. Building upon painting, sculpture, writing, and travel, her self-directed practice revolves around the dimensions of time, geography, and emotions in her own relationship with a former lover whom she once possessed and then lost. Traveling to find them—and dreaming of them—she contemplates the temperature and color of their skin repeatedly, re-experiencing and collecting them through journeys across mountains and rivers. She travels independently, shuttling between Europe and Asia, forging an intimate materiality of their bodies by exchanging the temperature and color of their skin, seeking the destiny of intimate relationships that have blown across mountains and rivers, synchronizing the awareness of past touch and memory into a cohesive whole.

Wei Yu studied Oriental painting at Hongik University in Korea and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Chinese painting from the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in China in 2022. Her undergraduate research focused on the philosophical theory of exchanging spiritual consciousness with natural matter in the painting space, based on a Chinese Southern Song painting monk named Mu Xi (牧溪）. She is studying MRes: Art and Humanities in the Royal College of Art in September.

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