Peng Wu is a recovering insomniac.
For the many years sleep evaded him, Wu’s mind turned over at night with turbulent thoughts about global immigration, health disparity and queer rights.
But like many healers on their way to self-discovery, what Wu learned through not sleeping is this: rest is resistance.
Wu visited Fargo on January 26 and 27 to install his exhibition at NDSU Memorial Union Gallery, one that addresses immigration policy and the power of rest as an act of resistance. The exhibition is now on display through March 19.
Born and raised in China, Wu combines both ancient and emerging technologies to create large-scale public art installations that encourage viewers to touch and interact with the artwork.
One piece on display at NDSU, titled “Rest is Resist,” invites audiences to lie on one of a circle of nap mats to rest underneath a giant fabric canopy hanging from the ceiling. Another encourages audiences to write down their immigration experience using a piece of head-shaped chalk.
“It’s a little weird,” Wu said. “Holding a head in your hand.”
And feeling a little weird is kind of the point. Wu’s art suggests that through participatory art, we reflect on human marginalization while making space for healing and connection. It’s not always a comfortable experience, but the destination is worth the journey.
Wu holds two master’s degrees in product design and sculpture, as well as a bachelor’s degree in physics. He currently works at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design where they teach classes on art as social practice.
A 2022-23 MCAD-Herome Fellow, Wu’s work is now on display at NDSU Memorial Union Gallery through March 19.
Here is more with artist Peng Wu.
Q: What does it mean to be an interdisciplinary artist? What kinds of freedoms and restrictions does this identification offer you?
Wu: For me, being an interdisciplinary artist means having the freedom to tell a story from multiple, entangled perspectives rather than a single discipline. Take sleep, for example. If I approached my insomnia only through medicine, it would be framed as an individual health problem. If I approached it only through immigration policy, it would be reduced to bureaucracy. But my experience of sleeplessness is shaped by overlapping systems—labor, visa precarity, racialization, and social expectations—and no single discipline can hold that complexity.
Identifying as an interdisciplinary artist also challenges the conventional economic model of art making: the idea that a potter sells pots, a painter sells paintings. That model doesn’t fit my practice. I make my living as a college professor, which allows me to research, teach, and sustain my work without forcing it into a marketable object category. That position gives me a different kind of freedom—to move between disciplines, to work with objects, rituals, performances, and public events, and to tell stories that might not be possible from within one field alone.
Q: You love participatory art. Tell us more about that and what gallery visitors will discover about it when they view your work.
Wu: If we look at human history, non-participatory art—art that can only be looked at and not touched or used—occupies a very small window of time. For thousands of years, objects like tools, vessels, textiles, and ritual items were deeply integrated into everyday life. It was only in relatively recent, colonial modernity that museums emerged to separate artefacts from the communities they came from, placing them behind glass and redefining them as “fine art.”
That separation shaped how Western art institutions operate, privileging non-functional, non-touchable objects and excluding forms of making that are central to the lives of the global majority. In that sense, participatory art isn’t a niche practice—it’s people’s art that belongs to the global majority.
In this exhibition, even when objects are displayed in a gallery setting, I invite visitors to go beyond looking. They can write using porcelain chalk made from a casting of my head, lie down on the installation Rest Is Resist, or encounter videos that show how objects are meant to be used in daily life. Through the audience’s participation, we can collectively reject the elite notion of what is fine art.
Q: Curing insomnia through art. What’s on display at NDSU that reflects this theme?
Peng Wu: I approach insomnia very differently from a sleep doctor. I don’t see my body as something broken that needs to be fixed. Instead, I see sleeplessness as a symptom of a society that exhausts people—especially immigrant and racialized laborers.
For me, insomnia is tied to visa systems designed to extract labor, to overwork, and to produce a culture where people internalize exploitation and believe that constant productivity makes them worthy. This logic is reinforced by myths like the “model minority,” which valorize submission and hard work while denying rest.
Through my work, I try to redefine these values. Rest is not worthless; it is refusal. Rest is a way of saying no to colonial and capitalist systems that depend on our exhaustion.
The large-scale installation Rest Is Resist at NDSU grows directly from this thinking. It creates a space where rest itself becomes the artwork— a quiet but radical gesture.
Q: How should gallery-goers participate in the exhibition?
Peng Wu: There is a substantial amount of text available for those who want to read closely, but participation doesn’t require intellectual labor. Visitors are welcome to simply lie down on the sleeping mats that are part of Rest Is Resist and take an afternoon nap.
In a society that constantly demands productivity (if you heard about the popular mantra I will sleep when I’m dead), resting—especially in a public or semi-public space—can be a meaningful act. I invite gallery-goers to reconnect with their bodies and experience rest not as laziness but as active resistance.
Q: What does creating a healthy public space look like? What kinds of healing needs to take place and how does your art—and interdisciplinary collaboration—play a role in that?
Peng Wu: This is a difficult question, especially right now. When my home state of Minnesota is effectively occupied by federal agents and civilians are being brutally executed in public spaces in broad daylight, public space itself becomes frightening. Before coming to Fargo for this exhibition, I stayed home for more than a week, avoiding public spaces as much as possible.
In moments like this, the most basic question isn’t how to make public space healthy, but how to make it safe—for everyone. Safety is the minimum condition before healing can begin.
For my participatory art projects in this moment of history, I often collaborate with private space owners to host gatherings where people can feel more protected. These spaces allow for rest, conversation, and collective presence without fear. Through interdisciplinary collaboration—bringing together art, education, ritual, and care—I see my role as creating temporary infrastructures of safety, where healing can start even when the larger systems have failed us.
More about artist Peng Wu
Website: https://cargocollective.com/pengwu/About-Peng-Wu
In the media: https://wam.umn.edu/peng-wu-and-art-sleep
About NDSU Memorial Union Gallery
The Memorial Union Gallery hosts twelve exhibitions a year featuring visiting artists, artwork from the collections, undergraduate and graduate students as well as themed exhibitions exploring the complex issues of our time. Visit the MU Gallery online.
