By Cansu Waldron

Run Wu is a visual artist, animation director, and creative director whose work moves fluidly across animation, photography, moving image, and experimental digital art. His practice blends cinematic storytelling with contemporary internet aesthetics, building atmospheric visual worlds that often feel like fragments of a larger narrative. Rather than treating each medium separately, Wu approaches them as interconnected tools for constructing mood, image systems, and immersive visual environments.

His career began in motion within the advertising world, but he soon realized his interest lay less in traditional commercial formats and more in creating images that suggest broader, evolving worlds. That shift led him to explore multiple mediums as ways to build atmosphere and narrative from different angles. Today, he balances commercial work — which sharpens precision and execution — with personal projects where he experiments more freely with visual language. Across his films and visual work, Wu is often drawn to moments of tension and ambiguity: spaces where the familiar feels slightly off, where human and machine blur, and where images hover between control and chaos.

We asked Run about his art, creative process, and inspirations.

Your work moves between animation, photography, moving image, and experimental digital art. How did your practice evolve to include these different forms?

My practice started in motion in advertising, but I quickly realised I wasn’t interested in that format — I was interested in constructing images that feel like fragments of a larger world. Animation, photography, and moving image are just different entry points into that same system. Over time, I began treating each medium as a tool to build atmosphere and narrative, rather than separate disciplines.

How do you navigate working between commercial projects and more personal or experimental work?

Commercial work is often about precision, perfection and constraints, while personal work is where I tried to break things and test new visual language. The two inform each other — one sharpens execution, the other expands possibility. Nowadays as I become more experienced in the industry I have the ability to pick the commercial project that I take and say no to certain ones so I can have more time for my own work.

Across your films and visual projects, what themes or ideas tend to surface repeatedly?

I think a lot of my work comes from this sense of being in-between things — not fully one thing or another. I’m drawn to moments where something feels familiar but slightly off, like it’s shifting between human and machine, between control and chaos. I’m interested in that tension, where things don’t quite resolve. It feels more honest to me than something that’s clean or complete.

What role does experimentation play in your creative process?

I don’t really believe in finished images. I try to build my own language, push them until they fail, and then use whatever comes out of that failure. That’s usually where the work becomes interesting, the so-called happy accident.

How has your approach to directing or creative leadership evolved as your projects have grown in scale?

Earlier on, I was focused on execution. Now, it’s more about building a clear visual language and guiding a team towards it. Sometime it's not just about my vision, its about realising the potential of other team members, and try to maximise it to enhance or add to the overall vision.

What influences are currently shaping your work?

Currently I'm influenced by early internet aeshtetics, Japanese animation from the 90s, and fashion imagery that blurs narrative and abstraction, and also the subculture scene.

Looking ahead, what kinds of stories or visual formats are you interested in exploring next?

I’m interested in building longer-form visual worlds — projects that exist across film, installation, and anything in a physical space. I would like to delve more into the post-internet technological narrative.

What is a profound childhood memory?

Me and my childhood best friend who was also my neighbour, we still in first year of elementary school at the time, one saturday morning, both our parent are not home, we decided without parental supervision to wonder all the way to the other side of the town which we had not been, it was a real adverture for two 7-year-old kids, our parent went all around town to find us, and they did, we came home safe.

What is a fun fact about you?

I'm allergic to avocado.