Dongyi Wu’s works span across art jewelry, body jewelry, fashion accessory, and sculpture, and art jewelry is the primary medium of her artistic research. As a jewelry artist, exploring and recording types of emotions is always essential for Dongyi’s art. She likens herself as a storyteller, who narrates stories that seem to be trivial and common but can actually express strong and genuine emotions. The inspirations of those stories have been collected from wide fields such as literature books, her experiences, and researches of psychology. Dongyi transfers those invisible emotional experiences and vague feelings into visual arts to create a unique and expressive language among her jewelry works.
Moreover, Dongyi is a jewelry artist who fascinates playing with a wide range of unconventional materials, such as plastic, rubber, fabric, and found objects. She transforms and repurposes the alternative materials into wearable art, giving them special texture, distinct tactile, and new meaning during her creation.
Since 2018, Dongyi has focused on impressions on streets, and transfers these quick images into jewelry pieces that can be worn. The inspiration for the Keyring series comes from the everyday carrying objects—key chains. Dongyi wants to narrate the stories of their owners by recording the interesting details of the key chains with wearable pieces. For the new development of Keyring series, Dongyi has added more fashionable elements inspired by emoji stickers and soft attachments that are attached to the key chains, which infuse the Keyring earrings with an artistic sense and playfulness style.
Artist bio:
Dongyi Wu is a Chinese-born contemporary jewelry artist based in Gatlinburg, United States. By using a wide range of unconventional materials, Dongyi creates her narrative jewelry pieces with her expressive language that is inspired by literature, her own experiences, and research into psychology. Dongyi received her Master's Degree from Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States, and her Bachelor's Degree from Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology in China. Dongyi has had her works exhibited both nationally and internationally, such as JOYA Barcelona 2020 and Schmuck 2018. She was a finalist for the ENJOIA'T 2017 Award in Spain, the LEAP award 2019/20 in the United States, and won the Preziosa Young 2020 in Italy.
