Yuge Zhou's Video Installations Explore Individuality Within Urban Environments at Site:Brooklyn

Chicago-based artist Yuge Zhou is holding her first solo exhibition with Site:Brooklyn gallery this month. “Chorus of Idle Footsteps” showcases Zhou’s video installations that use everyday observations to explore the “confluence of individual needs and mass behavior.” By collaging footage and projecting them onto wall-mounted reliefs, images and sequences begin to harmonize into plots with underlying patterns.

“Chorus of Idle Footsteps” encompasses the artist’s overall practice, as selections of her past work are rearranged to produce a new collection. The title of the exhibition is taken from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, and examines the way in which individuals engage with mass culture. Taking videos from New York to the Midwest to California, Zhou repositions segments of her work in order to explore how people “unconsciously aggregate within urban environments,” a phenomenon she calls the “essential rhythm” of a place.

Underground Circuit consists of hundreds of video clips shot in New York City’s subway systems. The commuter’s movements are cyclical and repetitive, suggesting a performative quality and theatricality to an otherwise organic system. Zhou reconstructs Chicago into a towering utopia in To afar the water flows, unveiling a relationship between man-made structures and their natural surroundings. With her structural approach and cubist eye, Zhou focuses on the unexpectedness and harmony in repetition, revealing urban experiences to be “cacophonous, congested, politicized, and joyful.”

“Chorus of Idle Footsteps” will be on view from December 13 to January 18, 2020.

Site:Brooklyn
165 7th St
Brooklyn, NY 11215

For more exhibitions, Twelvepieces is showcasing the work of Peter Birk, Rasmus Balstroem and more at Nørre Stenbro Galleri in Aarhus, Denmark.