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Zidi Wu
Zidi Wu is a designer whose work spans set, lighting, and costume. Born in China and now based in London, she brings her unique perspective to every project she takes part in.
She received a solid foundation in fine art at the Affiliated High School of the China Academy of Art and later graduated with First Class Honours in Stage Design from the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Most recently, she completed her MA at Central Saint
Martins in 2025.
Her interests range from plays to contemporary dance, and she has worked on a wide variety of productions as a designer or as an assistant, constantly challenging herself. She seeks to approach the stage historically bringing together different theatrical elements in innovative ways to create experiences that lift the audience beyond
the present.
Website
Scroll through art works. Click to enlarge
Until I Found You
by Xuan Ma
Speculative concept models exhibited at Platform Theatre, Central Saint Martins
• Director: Xuan Ma
• Designer: Zidi Wu
• Mask Designer & Maker: Zidi Wu
Until I Found You is a theatre piece that combines narrative, masks, and live performance. It uses the structure of a fairytale to explore themes of family, memory, and identity.
Set in a small northern Chinese town around the year 2000, the story follows a child whose mother suddenly disappears. She embarks on a surreal journey—through forests from fairy tales, pirated Disney toys promising the American dream, and a father’s black plastic bag filled with vague hopes. On the last night of her childhood, she walks alone into the darkness.
The work reimagines classic fairy tales like Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood, blending them with Chinese family narratives to reflect on hope and loss during the early 2000s economic boom. The plot drew inspiration from personal memories, old family photos, local news stories, and the pirated media culture that shaped a generation.
In developing the concept, a series of installations were created based on the children's perspective in the story. Three boxes, showing building interiors are exhibited. From left to right, the three models are titled: “What is really inside that cupboard?”, “Sweet dreams carried us far away”, and “Mommy turned into shiny little bits.”
Building on these visual explorations, in the final stage production a black gauze screen was installed to cover the entire stage front, allowing projections of past cityscapes to overlap with the live performance, creating a layered interplay between memory, illusion, and reality. On stage, performers wear crude, handmade masks and move like rusty wind-up toys. Their actions contrast with projected footage of real urban landscapes, creating a tension between the real and the imagined. These mixed media elements—live performance and documentary visuals— merge to form a fractured memory-scape.
This piece asks: After the wave of rapid change, what happens to the promises that were never kept? The “pirated fairy tale” becomes a symbol of our generation’s emotional heritage — beautified memories, distorted childhoods, and a future that never fully arrived.
More than a story of a child searching for her mother, this is about a generation learning to survive reality through fantasy. The theatre becomes a memory lab, where lost dreams and distorted truths are replayed, dissected, and reimagined.
Farewell, Viann
by Qing Shan adapted by Yiying Lu
Pudong Grand Theatre, Shanghai
• Director: Rui Dai
• Set Designer: Zidi Wu & Dingwei Xu
• Lighting Designer: Ling Feng, Yuxuan Zhang
• Costume Designer: Dacheng Wang, Xi Liu, Lizi
• Video Design: Guangxin Wu, Yujie Ye, Zhe Chen
• Special Effects: Zhe Chen
Adapted from an online novel, the story follows Lin, who falls for the mysterious Viann on an internet forum. Viann stays just out of reach, and Lin’s search for the real woman behind the screen slowly drifts into dangerous longing.
"The subway roared through the darkness like a water snake feeding in the dirty sludge. Different people pass by with the same stories, and the world below is as hopeless as the city above.”
Based on this line from the script, I constructed the overall structure of the stage by using a huge glass box like a fish tank. Outside this fish tank, beds and subway seats are arranged for specific settings. Inside the tank is a lush tropical rainforest, and a pure white spiral staircase lead up to the first floor.
I use this closed structure as Lin's spiritual world. The glass in front is used to divide his real life. He refuses to leave the surreal world where he enjoys himself, just like a goldfish voluntarily living in an abandoned aquarium.
The story probes the delicate limits of love. Lin gives love and receives it in turn, yet it raises the question: does the beloved have the right to wound others? Does persistence belong to the one who loves, even when it moves only themselves? The plot may feel of another time, but those in love are often swept by the same madness, echoing each other’s longing, and inevitably, farewells are whispered along the way.
The Wrinled Child
Contemporary dance
Platform Theatre, Central Saint Martins
The Wrinkled Child is a contemporary dance theatre piece that began with a question: how do we carry pain, and how do we begin to let it go?
We kept returning to two contrasting images—ice and fire—as symbols of pain and healing. In between, we imagined people rushing past one another in the city—wearing the same clothes, following the same rhythms. Who stops to notice the scars beneath the surface?
With six adult dancers and two children, it reflects on the emotional weight we carry as we grow up, and the small moments of softness that somehow stay with us. It's about exhaustion, tenderness, collapse—and starting again.
“Pain is a rite of passage,
There are no adults in this world,
Only --
The wrinkled child.
Like the fragile resilience of grass.
Like a mermaid taking each painful, beautiful step on land.
Sprint, tired, clench your teeth,
And then take a deep breath,
Sweat drops, ice melting,
Blooming
Like Tears in Rain.”
This is a piece for all the unspoken things. For the past we never found the words to share, but which shaped the adults we became. It doesn’t try to offer answers. It simply tries to be honest—to sit with what hurts, and maybe—through what we can do now as the wrinkled children—make a little space for healing.
Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett
Speculative set and costume design
An imagination of a peculiar stage: A rooftop of an abandoned building, A circle traced in chalk, fragments of refuse scattered across the ground. An absurd performance unfolds before sunset. A row of spectators confined to narrow windowpanes.
Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes.
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