Chris Zhongtian Yuan

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

Chris Zhongtian Yuan's practice examines the ways in which space is politicised through sound and storytelling, collapsing notions of identity and time. Often through recomposing vernacular sonic and spatial materials - from intimate conversation to landscape, music to industrial architecture, silence to childhood room - the work builds worlds for new relations between personal and collective, self and the other, near and far, to emerge. Chris often collaborates with musicians and their community to collectively make sounds that reconstruct both individual and collective memories. Moving image draws on both analogue and digital cinematic techniques, as well as archival materials. The relationship between sound and image is choreographed by the edit, as a result of direct responses to research and affect. Their architecture training often gives precise spatial structure to narrative structure, where multiple places, identities and time periods collide. Their work can be seen as writing in space, queering existing forms. This has become a sensitive yet playful way of rewriting dominant narratives around technology, trauma, memory and geopolitics. Often trigged by personal anxiety and individualised narratives, their work reflects upon unhealed, pending ghosts of our time; these exiled ghosts aim to rewrite linear time as well as oppressive structures of power. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Reading International, Reading; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Somerset...

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