Yuqiao Zhang — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Yuqiao Zhang

(Photo/Media MFA 25)
https://astronautworklog.com/

Soundscape composed by Zhu Dongchen (feat. Jules Evens) Duplicated Mom, comprised of Prelude, Duplicated Mom I, Duplicated Mom II, A Stage for Mud, and Walking to the Sound of Future [artworks inside the dark room], and Eye Tracking Study of A Marriage Photo, and Cooking Experiment [hung outside the room], 2024 – 2025

Yuqiao Zhang’s media philosophy starts from photography’s core features of improvisation and its immanence as personified material. Each photograph unfolds in time, and demands one to orient one’s body in the moment anew. Here, photography is treated, in the artist’s words, ‘as a kind of protean ghost’, a ghost who ‘keeps finding tangible possession with appropriation of reality’. The title, Duplicated Mom, suggests multiplication and copying — a mother who exists in multiple versions, through multiple photographs, in multiple impressions that may not align with each other. The symmetrically positioned figure of the mother — as a profaned image of Door Gods which are no longer majestic guardians — becomes a site for investigating memory, identity, and the ways photographs themselves create and tamper with familial relationships. The installation’s controlled darkness and illumination create a choreography of appearance and disappearance, suggesting (in part) how memory works, how certain images surface in the mind while others recede. Like memory, the past is never fully present or fully absent, but continuously rearranging itself.

Zhang’s interest in spacetime distortions, structural cracks, and knowledge beyond language and classification is seen in these experiments with illumination and sound. Practically, this work stages fragmented memories by showing photographs within her ‘empathetic seeing’ system. The photography and sound installation deploys duration and rhythm as embodied experiences, to explore the non-functional, body-oriented relationships of both photographs and humans in the material world. The soundscape, in collaboration with composer Zhu Dongchen (featuring Jules Evens), further intensifies this sensory instability by incorporating pulsive frequency and mythic humming underneath. Viewers are expected to move, wait, and adapt themselves to fluctuating temporalities, rather than observe from a comfortable distance. They have their attention directed or alternately denied. They are meant to feel the inevitable proximity of an uncontrolled state of affairs, considering the works within a lightly ominous atmosphere.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025