Wu Jiaru on combining art and divination with tarot cards

When art and divination collide – Wu Jiaru transformed her pandemic hobby into art by creating a set of tarot cards out of 3D scans of moments in her life. She gives Zaneta Cheng a reading and talks about how the project has allowed her to break free from the restraints that once bound her creative process 

I’m sitting at a rickety table at HART Haus, in front of a 10m x 173cm work-in-progress mural called docile_body_xl_iii, a piece on canvas using oil,  charcoal and pencil. The artist, Wu Jiaru, is pulling out her tarot cards. These cards have an artwork title too. Called digital_scan_card_i, they’re one set of 100 that Wu produced in 2024 after picking up the art of divination during Covid. 

Wu asks me to choose six cards with my left hand. I comply. We flip over the cards to reveal a series of 3D scanned photographs from different stages of her life. Three are from her excursions to museums, like a bust of a queen at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from when she received a fellowship grant from the Asian Cultural Council. One card I pull shows her parents, who ran a restaurant together in the mainland while Wu was growing up, having dinner at a restaurant in Hong Kong. Another is a top shot of Wu’s friend’s house taken when she was helping her friend move. And there’s also one of a magazine shop. It’s one of only two photos depicting a bookstore and it’s the only card in her deck that links to a magazine. Uncannily, I’ve asked a question about my work and career. 

The images used in the deck were chosen from a series of photographs from Wu’s travels. “I selected 89 images from my travels to 3D scan and then render them back in 2D. I really like tarot cards. They’re something I learned to read during the pandemic. I would use the traditional set which is 40-something cards but found it quite limiting so I made one set myself because there’s more variety,” she explains. “And I’ve passed them to friends and others who can read tarot just to see if my set would work and, so far, the feedback has been really good. People have found that this deck works.” 

The cards are a natural evolution of Wu’s artistic journey. The artist has a BA in Fine Art and English Language from Tsinghua University and an MFA from the School of Creative Media in Hong Kong. Her work focused on classical painting before she moved into multimedia. “A lot of my work now is quite spiritual,” she notes. “I’ve been interested in folklore, myths and printmaking since I was young. I’ve worked to really unlearn the classic, traditional training that I received.” 

Her process at present is what she calls “automatic drawing”. In a return to painting after a long stint in sculpture and video art, Wu now draws to compulsion. “For my series of automatic drawings, I would just let my arm move where my instincts led me,” she says. “I wanted to use this method and apply it across different mediums.” This is also Wu’s way of breaking free from the structures that bound her to a particular style of art creation. 

“I’ve been trying to break old habits to make room for something else – something new and something that comes from me. The original intention is to just not think. I didn’t really plan out the medium so that I could simply listen to myself and let my intuition tell me what I wanted. To do that I needed to lose control and give myself room to go crazy, because you can’t orchestrate a hard break and switch. I needed to just let it happen.” 

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