Mingyu Wu -- Questões Celestiais: Axioms, Ceramics, and the Fire That Decides

🎨 Mingyu Wu 🏛️ Galeria da Boavista 📍 Lisbon 📅 2026 ✍️
contemporaryceramicssculpturestonewareporcelainlisbonportugalscience-fiction

Mingyu Wu — Questões Celestiais 天問

Standing Between Stoneware Bodies

I came to the Galeria da Boavista for the first time because of this show. Six stoneware forms arranged in sequence through the gallery, positioned at body height, creating an angular path you have to walk through rather than around. That’s the first thing Questões Celestiais does — it makes you negotiate space with the work, physically. These aren’t objects on pedestals you observe from a polite distance. They’re presences you move between, and they feel like they’re watching back.

The title translates as “Heavenly Questions,” and it carries the Chinese characters 天問 alongside the Portuguese. Three layers of language for a show that operates on at least as many levels.

The Title: 2,300 Years of Unanswerable Questions

Tianwen (天問) is one of the most extraordinary poems in Chinese literature. Attributed to Qu Yuan (c. 340—278 BCE), a poet and official of the ancient state of Chu, it consists of roughly 370 lines arranged in around 90 quatrains — and every single one of them is a question. No answers. No arguments. Just question after question, spanning cosmic origins, divine and mythological beings, religious beliefs, the nature of heaven, the shape of the earth, and the actions of human rulers.

The poem is traditionally divided into three sections: heavenly matters, earthly matters, and human matters. It reads like a mind refusing to accept what it’s been told, demanding to know why at every turn. There’s something radical about a 2,300-year-old text composed entirely of interrogation — no conclusions, no doctrine, just relentless curiosity.

Qu Yuan’s authorship is debated. Some scholars suggest he collected and arranged fragments circulating in the intellectual circles of his time. Either way, the poem became foundational — a monument to the idea that asking is more important than knowing.

The curators, Sara Antonia Matos and Pedro Faro, also note that Tianwen is the name of China’s space programme, under which the Tianwen-2 scientific exploration probe was launched in 2025. So the title reaches from ancient philosophy to interplanetary science — the same impulse to look beyond what’s visible and ask what’s really there.

Axiomatico — When Greg Egan Meets Stoneware

The Source: A Story About Revenge, Implants, and the Beliefs We Can’t Control

The series that anchors the exhibition is Axiomatico, and its literary source is one of the most unsettling science fiction stories I’ve encountered. Greg Egan’s “Axiomatic” is the title story from his 1995 collection of eighteen short stories, most written between 1989 and 1992. Egan is an Australian writer known for rigorously philosophical hard sci-fi — stories that take an idea about consciousness, identity, or physics and follow it to its most disturbing logical conclusion.

In “Axiomatic,” the protagonist, Mark Carver, is consumed by grief after his wife Amy is murdered by a man named Patrick Anderson. For years, Mark works his way step by step toward a revenge scenario, always telling himself he’d never actually go through with it. He can’t — his moral convictions won’t let him. He wants to kill Anderson, but his conscience, his “axiomatic core,” prevents it.

Then he discovers the implant store.

In Egan’s near-future, neural implants — small tubes of powder inhaled through the nose — can alter your brain with advanced nanotechnology. Not just psychedelic experiences, but fundamental personality modifications: your beliefs, your values, your sexual orientation, even your religion. You can walk into a shop and buy a temporary override for any conviction you hold. Mark buys a custom implant designed to suspend his moral beliefs about murder for three days. The implant provides a single, devastating axiom: “People are meat. They’re nothing, they’re worthless.”

Under its influence, Mark kills Anderson.

But here’s where Egan turns the screw. When the implant wears off, Mark doesn’t simply return to normal. The memory of clarity — of having seen people as worthless and acted on it with perfect conviction — persists. He now lives with two irreconcilable truths: his restored moral consciousness, and the vivid recollection of a state where none of it mattered. The story ends with Mark planning to return to the implant store. Not for revenge this time. The implication is far worse — he needs the implant just to live with what he’s done.

The story was nominated for the 1991 British SF Association Award and placed second in the Interzone Readers Poll.

What Wu Does with the Story

What fascinates me about Wu’s use of this source material is the translation — from narrative to form, from language to stoneware. The six pieces of Axiomatico are modelled in stoneware and displayed sequentially, creating a path you walk through. Their invisible internal axes embody the philosophical core of Egan’s story: what lies beneath our certainties? What is the foundation we build rationality on, and what happens when it can be switched off?

The monoliths are positioned at body height, and they function as bodies — not representations of bodies, but presences with the weight of bodies. Walking between them, I felt the unsettling double quality that Wu seems to be after: they’re simultaneously ancient and speculative. They could be artefacts excavated from a Neolithic site or prototypes from a civilisation that hasn’t happened yet.

And there’s the central paradox the curators identify: axioms are truths that require no proof, the bedrock of logical systems. But ceramics, by their nature, resist certainty. Porcelain and stoneware involve unforeseeable outcomes. The kiln has its own logic. You control the process up to a point, and then the fire decides. Wu is using the most unpredictable of materials to explore the idea of unquestionable truths. The tension between intention and surrender — between what the artist plans and what the kiln delivers — mirrors Egan’s story about the gap between what we believe and what we can be made to believe.

Plataforma — What the Fire Takes

The second series is named after Jia Zhangke’s 2000 film Platform (站台), and the reference is telling. Zhangke’s film follows a group of young performers in provincial China across a decade of seismic change (1979—1989), from Maoist propaganda troupes to private enterprise, from collective identity to individual dislocation. It’s a film about what gets lost in transformation — traditions, friendships, certainties — and about characters who can only chase modernity from a distance, like watching a train they’ll never catch.

Wu’s Plataforma porcelain works operate on a similar principle of loss-through-transformation. The technique is deliberately destructive: rapid-firing that rejects controlled modelling. Consumable materials are incorporated into the forms and then burn away during firing, leaving behind shells and membranes — traces of what was there and what the fire consumed. The resulting objects feel precarious, like evidence of a process rather than a finished product. They address transience, precarious existence, and ambiguous belonging.

If Axiomatico asks what we build our certainties on, Plataforma asks what disappears in the building. Together, the two series create a dialogue between permanence and loss, structure and fragility, that I find quietly profound.

The Paradox at the Heart of It

What stays with me about Questões Celestiais is the layering of references — a 4th-century BC poem made entirely of questions, a 1990s science fiction story about the horror of programmable belief, a 2000s Chinese film about losing yourself in historical transformation, a 2025 space probe reaching toward Mars — all channelled through the irreducibly physical act of shaping clay and surrendering it to fire.

Wu’s work sits at the intersection of philosophy, literature, and material craft. The ceramics don’t illustrate the ideas — they embody the tension between knowing and not knowing, between controlling and letting go. Standing between those stoneware forms, I felt the same vertigo Egan’s story produces: the realisation that the foundations we stand on might be more fragile — and more arbitrary — than we’d like to believe.

Exhibition Details

  • Exhibition: Questões Celestiais 天問 Heavenly Questions
  • Artist: Mingyu Wu
  • Dates: January 28 — April 26, 2026
  • Curators: Sara Antonia Matos and Pedro Faro
  • Venue: Galeria da Boavista, Rua da Boavista 50, 1200-066 Lisboa
  • Hours: Tuesday — Sunday, 10am — 1pm and 2pm — 6pm
  • Admission: Free

Resources & Links

The Exhibition

Greg Egan — Axiomatic

Qu Yuan — Tianwen (Heavenly Questions)

Jia Zhangke — Platform (站台)

Ceramics & Material Context