CLOSE, CLOSER

2020-21

Drawing from the artist’s mother Wang Qingli’s 1993 expedition to Lugu Lake in Yunnan, China, the video overlays drawings, archival images, historical paintings, texts and sounds to reimagine Wang’s Lugu Lake Paintings (1994), which were later sold and unable to be found. Structured as an intimate conversation between the artist and their mother, the film weaves together narratives around intimacy, settler colonialism, matriarchy, tourism and art market. As the video tries to turn Wang's paintings from low res JEPGs to livingness, we also experience an uneasy interrogation of the complex notion of motherhood and motherland, both personal and collective.

^{single channel HD video, sound,color, 10’

*Commissioned by OCAT Institute.}

WUHAN PUNK

2020

Using archive material and digital animation, 'Wuhan Punk' ruminates on the disappearance of Mai Dian, the charismatic frontman of Wuhan punk group Si Dou Le. Narrated in Wuhan dialect, 'Wuhan Punk' searches for memory and resistance. The film also reveals the lost footage of an interview that the artist did with Mai back in 2010.

^{single channel HD video, sound,color, 12’}
^{*Commissioned by Film & Video Umbrealla. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.}

1815

2019-20

Medium Rosemary Brown describes her collaboration with Beethoven, while the film travels to various places: CGI reconstructing Tambora's eruption based on Sir Stamford Raffles's official account; a Yunnan-based American missionary's poem accompanied by images of war, famine and opium; Mary Shelley drowning in Lake Geneva during the gloomy summer; and finally a hypnotic session of Brown channeling Beethoven's life and music in the volcanic darkness.

^{single channel HD video, sound,color, 8’35”}
^{*Commissioned by K11 Wuhan.}

COUNTERFICTIONS

2018-19

Counterfictions ultises sound and architecture to construct alternative realities on the border after the construction of Trump’s wall proposal. It starts with a journalistic comment on Donald Trump’s wall, and ends with a haunting myth of biologists tracking a genetically mutated species along the U.S.-Mexico border. Counterfictions weaves together information from scientific facts, Trump’s quote, fictional literature and mythology.

^{single channel HD video, sound, color, 10’40”, drawing, text}^{*Supported by Architectural Association.}

GHOST TOWERS

2017-18

The video shows the nightmare of Dagenham regeneration councillor, who is suffering from melancholia caused by both current and past events. Ghost towers are reincarnations of past and present archetypes of the borough. They are skeletal highrises, empty follies and leftovers of neoliberal desires – dream structures of false progress.

^{single channel video, sound, color, 8’25”

*Supported by Architectural Association.}

CITY OF OBJECTS

2016-17

In the post-Documenta context of Athens, a privately-funded art institution proposes an open-gated, 24/7 curriculum in order to both embrace the existing street life, and bring catalyst to ongoing crises in the city. Through curating a series of programmed architectural objects in the city, the new institution hopes to bring high and low, art and life, academia and everyday life together.

^{collage, physical model, drawing, various dimensions

*Supported by Architectural Association.}

CHRIS YUAN

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