Viki Wu is sipping a cup of hot water while talking to the Georgia Straight in a back gallery at Art Beatus, where her photographs are on view. She earlier confessed nervousness at the prospect of being interviewed, but at this moment, as she discusses the formal strategies and conceptual content of her photo art, she appears composed and self-possessed. What might have been straightforward portraits of individual friends and colleagues, staged in domestic interiors or back-yard gardens, are complicated by the presence of mirrors. In some instances, the mirrors are held horizontally by Wu’s models; in other instances, they hang as ovals on darkened walls or vertically divide the picture plane, creating the illusion of a separate and distinct space.

What the mirrors reflect, sometimes mysteriously, is Wu herself, essentially creating a double portrait. Still, her face is either obscured by her camera as she takes the shot or is intentionally cut off by the frame of a mirror. Her practice, she says in her artist’s statement, is about “visualizing the invisible presence of the photographer”, in a sense making her a performer in her own scenarios. What she accomplishes in her images is a state of being both there and not there: she represents herself as the creator of the composition, yes, but she also masks her identity.

“When I look at a photograph,” she tells the Straight, “I am always wondering, ‘What is the photographer doing? What pose is he or she taking? How is she holding the camera?’ ” Her own images propose answers to those questions for her viewers while touching on other, subtextual ideas concerning identity and personal agency. And perhaps, given her history, this is not surprising.

Born in Jiangsu, a coastal province of China, Wu says, “I learned how to be independent when I was a kid.” While her parents devoted themselves to business, she was sent to boarding school in China, and when she was 16, she arrived in Vancouver to attend high school and then university. “I was alone and needed to learn everything myself,” she says frankly, although she also emphasizes that she had a “super nice” home-stay family in those high-school years. “They treated me as a daughter.”

While a student in Simon Fraser University’s visual-arts program (from which she recently graduated), Wu fell in love with photography. She describes a revelatory assignment, in a course led by artist Sabine Bitter, to make and use a pinhole camera, and develop the print herself. “I was suddenly obsessed with the process,” she says, observing an obvious shift of technique and involvement from the cellphone and digital cameras she had been using previously. She was also interested to observe how, in an age of relentless selfies, cellphone photos, and social media postings, her models’ behaviour changes depending on the type of camera she uses and the care she takes in lighting and posing them. “I act differently, too,” she adds.

The Straight rarely profiles newly fledged artists, but there is something strikingly promising in Wu’s photographs and in the passion and conviction she brings to her art. Especially notable is an untitled photo of a young woman, dressed in white, sitting at the edge of a swimming pool and holding a long, horizontal mirror. Reflected in the mirror, which is speckled with rain, is another young woman—Wu—dressed in white, sitting at the edge of a swimming pool, holding not a mirror but a camera. “That photograph is one of my favourites,” Wu says. “Making it was very pure, authentic, and true to myself.”