Chris Zhongtian Yuan

Interview by Alexis Aceves Garcia

How do we archive the missing? How do we fill in the gaps of history produced by colonial violence and erasure? Born in Wuhan, China, Chris Zhongtian Yuan is a multidisciplinary artist who contends with these questions using film, sound, language, CGI-rendered and natural landscapes, and more. A graduate from the Architectural Association in London and University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, they chase exiled ghosts through absence and construct landscapes to hold the haunting. In the process, they collapse time and space to strengthen the intimate connections between the displaced. This work of imagination and reverence is an ongoing act of refusal and a commitment to building archives where ghosts are heard and cared for. As one of three shortlisted honorees for the 2022 Foundwork Art Prize, Chris spoke with me about the origins of their archiving practice, making space for screaming, interrogating structures of power through architectural renderings, and the potentiality of resonant sound over the physical manifestations of body and place.

Alexis Aceves Garcia (AAG): What questions and/or obsessions drive your archival practice?

Chris Zhongtian Yuan (CZY): I think my interest in archiving really came by chance. I made my first video work, Boundless City, back in 2010 and I interviewed Mai Dian, who is the co-founder of Youth Autonomous Centre at the Centre in Wuhan, during a summer holiday back in college. Then for a long time I tried to get away from home and this piece of work as much as possible. But at the beginning of lockdown in 2020, I interviewed for an artist fellowship and when I got to the final round, the curator asked to see this work. I looked everywhere but couldn't find the original footage. It became this obsession for me to look for traces of this work, and into the whereabouts of Mai Dian, who had since disappeared.

How do I archive something that doesn't exist anymore and, also, if it doesn't exist, how do I construct it? Do I try to reconstruct my memory? Do I reconstruct images that come from my memory? I started looking for the information that I had about the work of Mai Dian, which is only a few film stills printed from a 2010 exhibition catalog, the texts he’d written circulating online, and stories that I've collected interviewing some of his friends. That was my entry point into archiving something that was missing. Even from the beginning, I was thinking of archives as something that exist outside of the canon, because even Mai Dian’s existence was very much on the margins of Chinese society. Instead, I looked for anecdotes. I looked for the things people had written about him in youth forums that had started my obsession.

AAG: Thank you so much for that. It's important for us to build our own archives because of our particular attentions as artists. At the end of the day, the purpose of an archive is to bring materials together that we deem worthy of saving.

CZY: You've coined something which really resonated with me. For the past three years, I've been seeing a lot of stories and news from home, and many are tragic and violent narratives and images. My parents still live in China, as do a lot of my friends and family. So I was seeing that at a distance, and also seeing things constantly being posted and then quickly censored and erased on social media. There was a very emotional moment when people were repeatedly posting the same piece of information that kept getting erased. Everybody was posting this blank link, and when you clicked into that link, it was empty. I took a screenshot of all this, of everybody sort of collectively posting this link. That space felt like even though our voices had been erased, the act of everyone doing it individually was creating a personal archive so as not to forget.

"How do I archive something that doesn't exist anymore and, also, if it doesn't exist, how do I construct it? Do I try to reconstruct my memory? Do I reconstruct images that come from my memory?"

Boundless City, 2010

Film stills

AAG: I'm sitting with that because it's a personal but also collective effort of pushing against erasure and communicating with one another and the world. Especially from where you are at a distance, that's so much to hold. How can we create archives that can hold even that—that feeling, that intimacy?

I want to move into a question about intimacy because I was really struck by that in your work as a whole, and especially in your short film, All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss, where you created on-screen dialogue between two exiled ghosts in a forest between death and reincarnation. Amongst the trees and audible narrative, they are able to share their collective histories and folklore in an intimate way. The piece also takes its name from Beloved by Toni Morrison. Intimacy feels like a way into your archival work. How do you make intentional space for it amongst colonial legacies of alienation, violence, and displacement?

CZY: Even from the beginning, with Wuhan Punk, Mai Dian was a family friend and somebody I looked up to growing up. There is this residual kind of intimacy that's always been there. In college, I started reading his writings on power and the politics of space, and became really drawn to that and also the way he was trying to carve a space for people with alternative voices to come together. So when I heard about his disappearance in 2019 from an artist friend, it was something I couldn't get out of my head. When the pandemic hit, my thoughts of him, along with my thoughts for my hometown of Wuhan, really became intertwined. I was in this domestic setting in my small apartment, and so these thoughts became sort of entangled in this space. Everything became more intimate than ever. I think, in a way, that Wuhan Punk is a diary that documents all of my racing thoughts. I chose to narrate the video myself, and use the local Wuhanese dialect, because the dialect itself is something I use when I speak to my parents, or speak to my close friends back home. Speaking in that dialect was also a very intimate act for me.

In All Traces Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss, I started thinking, where is that space for intimacy when we are experiencing constant flocks of displacement and exile, personally and historically? I read Beloved my first year in college and revisited that book when I was making the work. I really resonated with this ghost haunting the domestic space. This ghost empowered me to reflect my relationship to home, land, trauma, past and present. My intention is not to speak for others, but to simply start from my own visceral connection to this piece of work and then borrow that framework to speak for myself and then speak with others.

For so many years, my parents' generation, my generation and, when I moved to the states, many of my Asian American friends, felt that the figure of the ghost represents us because we never feel seen, heard, or empowered to speak up. The work really gave me a chance to dig deeper into my personal history as well as the collective history of migration and displacement. During my research I encountered The Intimacies of Four Continents by Lisa Lowe. I was really drawn to the way she made connections between place and geography. The idea of intimacy transcended from something personal to something more critical. She pointed out the intimacy created by the European colonial trade brought people, objects, and continents together, but had a very violent dimension and result.

"For so many years, my parents' generation, my generation and, when I moved to the states, many of my Asian American friends, felt that the figure of the ghost represents us because we never feel seen, heard, or empowered to speak up."

All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss, 2021-22

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All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss, 2021-22

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All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss, 2021-22

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AAG: There is something dynamic about exploring ghosts, not just in terms of being unseen, but there is power in what a ghost sees without being seen. I’m also thinking about that space before reincarnation, where you're about to start a new history and reckoning with legacies of your old life, which can feel like a migration narrative because we are displaced from that legacy, but still embody that travel and hold those names.

CZY: I think it's really brilliant that you mentioned that ghosts might not be seen, but they can be present in another way. I think the way ghosts present themselves might not be through their figurative presence, but could be through sound, traces, or making marks. I love that you mentioned the building of intimacy between ghosts within this liminal space because I've always been drawn to that place. People never talk about it in Western culture. There's always this strong sense of a binary, but people don't really appreciate or want to explore the liminal space where I think most ghosts exist.

My obsession with searching for the ghosts again started with Mai Dian and Wuhan Punk. He has become this lingering figure for resistance. Especially in the current climate, people have been thinking about how Mai Dian represents so many ghosted figures of resistance. The reality is cruel, and while we’d rather remember them while they’re still present, with the current conditions, that's all we're left with.

It can also be empowering because we never even used to speak with this vocabulary; we never really thought about resistance because it was just not something people grew up with or thought was possible. So I think perhaps this way of resisting is our own unique response to power structures.

AAG: Tracing these ghosts and bringing them to the forefront of people's minds is an act of resistance. In Wuhan Punk, you weave the history of the Wuhan Punk movement with personal histories of Wuhan and drone footage of the city’s architecture that moves into CGI animated renderings, and overlay a soundscape of everyday noise, the punk music of Si Dou Le, and narration that moves between anecdote, research, and speculation. During your Frank Davis Memorial Lecture at The Courtauld, you connect the overlaid soundscape to your own embodiment, “...some days I feel like a human being but other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world now as myself but then as an echo of who I was.” Can you talk more about the relationship between sound, your body, and your art practice?

CZY: Yeah, thank you for that. That quote actually came from Ocean Vuong's book On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The way he writes about his own experience and ties it into collective history reminds me how important it is for me to establish that kind of relationship with the rest of the world, not necessarily through my physical presence, but through voice, through music, and through being heard or unheard.

When I made Wuhan Punk, it was the first time I felt like I was finally starting to make noise. Me and this place have been misunderstood for so long, it reached the point that I needed to scream about it in order to make people listen. That was the initial response: I needed to scream. After that, I told myself to calm down and write my thoughts, be articulate, and try to find voices from writers who might not look like me, but who I have a cerebral or bodily connection to and could help support my voice. I never felt that I was an articulate person. I always have anxiety about public speaking. When I write, when I speak, I feel that I need to borrow from other writers. Borrowing from Ocean Vuong, Toni Morrison, and so many others gives me the courage to speak out. During the pandemic, it was a way of establishing a collective not just with the writers, but with their words.

AAG: I love what you're saying about turning to other writers to help support your voice. It’s like building a constellation of thought around yourself as a writer, as an artist. I like to think, “Whose lineage am I a part of? What legacies am I a part of in art-making and what legacies am I disrupting?” To build intimacy between your work and that of others who have come before you strengthens and amplifies your voice. It becomes part of a chorus of sound. It gives people multiple entry points into the work as well. I also want to affirm that a part of any art practice could and should be screaming sometimes.

CZY: Right.

AAG: A place to begin or a place to return to, those emotions birth something that should not be forgotten.

CZY: Thank you, that was really beautiful. Where I've been living, to scream as a foreigner is considered rude. I have this frustratingly bizarre relationship with the idea of being rude. For the longest time, I would start everything by apologizing, always feeling apologetic, and keeping my head down, but there are still people who try to label me as rude. When I was making Wuhan Punk, I wasn't aware of the fact that punk music comes from the UK. I never grew up with British Punk. For me, Wuhan Punk was something so unique, and it existed within a circle that was so intimate to me. Then I started looking into the local punk movement here in the UK, which is something I have become increasingly interested in. It's not that I want to become a punk in British society, but there are days when I do wish I could just scream. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in the wrong place, like I'm conditioned to be this well-behaved, apologetic person, and other days I feel right at home.

AAG: Some of these things feel unlanguagable sometimes. Speaking from my own experience, it's hard to be angry. It's almost a privilege to be able to yell. And as a poet myself, I create a lot of poems out of an imbalance of power.

CZY: Wow. Yeah.

AAG: In moments when I feel powerless, I can recreate that narrative and expose the advantage that people take over others. I understand the work can be a place where these feelings are let out or boiled down into other things. There are so many emotions that go into art making and so many places to begin. I honor your anger, and I think we all need more space to scream because where else does that go in your body? Where do you hold it? How does it turn into other things? I wish more yelling for both of us.

CZY: Oh, thank you. Please send your poems, if you feel comfortable.

AAG: Yeah, yeah, I will! It's necessary for the work to go there sometimes. It reminds me that I'm not alone in trying to figure out how to be angry. We're also in lineages of working that out.

CZY: Exactly. I feel like there's always a sense of figuring out, approximating, and creating new, but at the same time feeling extremely anxious about carving out space in an environment where you're not necessarily being supported or understood. It can feel empowering, but at the same time, very lonely. It can sometimes feel kind of threatening. When I talk about resistance, I also want to move beyond some of these binary polarities, for instance, resistance versus submission to domination. But there are some days I feel like I want to repeat active resistance. I go through cycles of being a bit impulsive, but then retreating back to reflection. Does that make sense?

"There's always a sense of figuring out, approximating, and creating new, but at the same time feeling extremely anxious about carving out space in an environment where you're not necessarily being supported or understood. It can feel empowering, but at the same time, very lonely. It can sometimes feel kind of threatening."

Wuhan Punk,2020

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Wuhan Punk, 2020

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Wuhan Punk, 2020

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AAG: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, impulsivity can also be intuitive, right? We're multifaceted beings with so many expectations put on us, and in some ways we have to free the work from those expectations and frameworks of legibility. In your work, impulse and reflection can exist outside of a binary, especially when you're making sense of these feelings and building new spaces. Thinking now about the CGI landscapes you've created and your background in architecture, if research and imagination are two ways of knowing, your work sits in a third space of understanding, where they inform, mix, glitch, and reimagine each other. What is possible for you here, as an artist?

CZY: A long time ago, when I was designing buildings, I created a lot of hyper realistic imagery and renderings of buildings that were being designed but not built. These images are so realistic that they often replace the real architecture, which makes me think about how much of the architecture in the world is necessary. Instead of something physical, I was always interested in building the absence, the unknown, and the missing. To intentionally create space for something that's devoid of the material is a way for me to question all existing power structures. These reconstructed images and sounds are my way of re-imagining the past and filling the missing gaps across time, whereas research is not just an orthodox or canonical way of looking into conventional archives, but one that has also become a way for me to retreat into interpersonal relationships with my family and friends.

In a way, because my work is in between research and imagination, it's not about making the physical object. It’s not about giving a figurative presence to the missing, but instead creating vibrations, creating echoes, creating this resonance between myself and, hopefully, a wider audience. That is what I hope for my practice as an artist—to keep engaging both the interpersonal and the intimate while reflecting on collective histories through myself.

Alexis Aceves Garcia

Alexis Aceves Garcia is a trans writer, researcher, and archivist living in San Diego, CA. They are currently working on a hybrid manuscript about queer temporality, trans desire, and the expansiveness of t4t love.