Riddle Inspired by London's children's tales and her lived experience in the UK, Wu Qiong fused her unrestrained imagination with skilled technique to create this series of seemingly childish but wonderfully riddle-laden paintings.
Children's tales also appear in literature, especially detective fiction as a decoding tool. Wu Qiong's interpretation of children's tales becomes painted riddles, filled with windows, the sun and moon, arch games, circles dances, clapping games, catching games, courtship and marriage games, skipping rhymes and other mythic elements. These games in her paintings often allude to historical events; for example the arch game is a kind of catching game where the kid being caught when the arch falls will be out, like the execution at a guillotine. Many of the stories are drawn from London fires, pestilences, disasters and executions. The singing children, however, might not realise these implications. Children's songs seem to be innocent, but actually contain an array of riddles.