Chris Zhongtian Yuan Screenings

This screening of current artist in residence Chris Zhongtian Yuan’s moving image works, navigates the artist’s personal history and shared cultural memories in post-Cultural Revolution China.

Moving fluidly between reality, myth and half-remembered moments, and techniques including puppetry, stop-motion animation, Super 8 and found footage, Yuan’s moving image practice is at times dreamlike and surreal whilst still remaining focused on examining the role of memory in familial, domestic and institutional dynamics.

Wild Acts: Act I, 2024 (16 mins)
Taking Yěrén, a Chinese legend, similar to Bigfoot, as a point of departure, the film is the first instalment of a trilogy that utilises puppetry to explore the resurgence of the popular myth in shaping familial relations and institutional contexts following China’s Cultural Revolution. To prepare for the film, the artist undertook puppetry training with British puppeteer Ronnie Le Drew.

Childhood Scenes, 2023 (6 mins)
Inspired by Czech and Chinese communist TV programmes during the Cultural Revolution era, Yuan reenacts with surreal distortion some of the domestic and institutional spaces they once occupied as a child, via stop-motion animation.

No Door, One Window, Only Light, 2023 (12 mins)
Following the recent death of L, an artist and friend of Yuan’s, the artist talks to them through an imagined letter exchange. These letters between two friends become a place where questions of home, vulnerability, resistance, memory, and fraught relations are asked. Centring on an architectural model of the artist’s childhood room, the film is entirely shot on Super 8 and accompanied by music from Langham Research Centre and a recording by artist Huiqi He.

Close, Closer, 2020-21 (10 mins)
Drawing from the artist’s mother’s 1993 expedition to Lugu Lake in Yunnan, China, the video overlays drawings, archival images, historical paintings, texts and sounds to reimagine her Lugu Lake Paintings which were later lost. Structured as an intimate dialogue between the artist and their mother, the film weaves together narratives around intimacy, settler colonialism, matriarchy, tourism and the art market.

Wuhan Punk, 2020 (12 mins)
Using archive material and digital animation, Wuhan Punk reflects on the disappearance of Mai Dian, the charismatic frontman of Wuhan punk group Si Dou Le. Narrated in the Wuhan dialect, the work searches for memory and resistance. The project also uses lost footage of an interview with Mai, conducted by Yuan in 2010, as part of the artist's very first video work.

About Chris Zhongtian Yuan

Chris Zhongtian Yuan (b. 1988, Wuhan, China) is an artist based in London. Yuan's work has been shown in institutions including Macalline Art Center (2023); The Courtauld Institute of Art (2021); MAC Panama (2025); Kunsthal Rotterdam (2025); Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2025); Guangdong Times Museum (2024); Reading International (2023); Whitechapel Gallery (2022); Power Station of Art (2021); OCAT Institute (2021, 2020); Venice Architecture Biennale Greek Pavilion (2018) among others.

chriszhongtianyuan.com

Access

This event will be seated. If you have any questions or need assistance with your visit, please feel welcome to contact us at +44 (0) 20 7622 1294 or info@studiovoltaire.org. Read Studio Voltaire's full access information here.

Image credit

1. Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Childhood Scenes, 2023. Moving image still, courtesy of the artist.
2. Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Close Closer, 2020–21. Moving image still, courtesy of the artist.
3. Chris Zhongtian Yuan, No Door One Window Only Light, 2023. Moving image still, courtesy of the artist.
4. Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Wild Acts: Act I, 2024. Moving image still, courtesy of the artist.