Artist Feature
Yuge Zhou
About Yuge Zhou
A decade ago, I left my home in Beijing where the rapid transformation of the urban landscape dramatically reshaped the city and people’s lives. From China to America, and from the East coast to the Midwest, I have become deeply intrigued with natural and constructed urban spaces where I’ve lived and the distinctive characteristics of these spaces as sites of shared dreams.
Having moved across continents left me with a longing for a sense of rootedness and intimacy. My work originates from a simple desire to observe and connect with my surroundings—both physical and psychological spaces. I use the camera to document ritualistic moments in urban and nature landscapes and reassemble this documentation into scenes that create meaningful coincidences, relationships and patterns, both from a personal and political points of view. I am motivated to explore and transform myself into a hybrid of two cultures. There are obvious cultural differences, but there are also universally shared emotions: anxiety, joy, fear, longing—all of which are what I hope to evoke through the lens of my work. My recent projects explore the physical and emotional distance between my homeland and adopted country and the theme of transcending separation. I am also incorporating choreographed dancers as a vehicle to explore the intersection between performance and video art.
Chorus of Idle Footsteps
To Afar the Water Flows
Chorus of Idle Footsteps, in the spirit of her overall practice, rearranges selections from past series into a new collection. The title, taken from French scholar Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, examines the ways in which we engage with mass culture as individuals. With her signature collaging and cubist strategies, Zhou fragments our documented realities in order to create new, visionary perspectives on cacophony, harmony, and joy. Zhou’s work asks us to reexamine our notions of individuality as she watches us unconsciously coalesce within urban environments. Zhou also makes us reconsider how the moving image can be experienced by projecting her work onto wall-mounted reliefs and collaging her footage in unprecedented ways.
To afar the water flows
I am deeply intrigued by the interplay of the built and natural environments—light, clouds, traffic and footsteps, moving objects and spaces…. In traditional Chinese landscape painting, the water is a common symbol of flow and harmony; for me, the rhythm of sounds on pavement is equally as nostalgic. Through its endless repetitions, the city inherits the cycles and transcendence of nature.
Midtown Flutter
Midtown Flutter is composed of footage of architectural patterns in midtown Manhattan, sporadically interrupted by pedestrians’ footsteps.
Installation Images
Underground Circuit
Underground Circuit is a collage of hundreds of video clips shot in New York City’s subway stations. The commuters’ movements are cyclical, suggesting a performative quality, an urban theatricality, which, despite its seemingly geometric choreography, remains organic. It is an environment where anonymity and irreducible complexity form a rich social texture.
Green Play & Pale Patrol
Green Play is a joyful orchestration on a single summer Sunday of one of the great utopian playgrounds in New York City: Central Park. Pale Patrol aims for an ambiguous, even mysterious effect, a frozen stage with potential conflict and no resolution, only symbolic gestures and social encounters. Both are part of The Humors series, inspired by the ancient Greek philosophy of the four temperaments or “humors” in which human personalities are pre-defined and capable of overlap.