Meet Yunwei Zhou

Today we’d like to introduce you to Yunwei Zhou.

Hi Yunwei, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I have always been envious of those who discovered a burning passion early in their lives. From various speeches and interviews, I witnessed stories of individuals who, for example, typed letters on a computer keyboard and knew that they wanted a life as a programmer or guitarist who found their way to music upon picking up a guitar for the first time. Similarly, the life orientation of a photographer often began by playing with a camera at an early age. With a distinct passion, their lives seemed more straightforward, yet this realization never happened to me. Mine was not a linear path. Though I had many interests, none had sustaining power as a pressing desire. The path before me was a complex one of wondering, wandering, experimenting, failing, and eliminating. Until recently, art seldom crossed my mind. I grew up in Shijiazhuang, a fairly large city in the northern region, Hebei province of China, with a population of more than 10,000,000 people—about ten times that of Rhode Island. Despite its size, cultural activities were rare, compared to nearby Beijing as the underlying purpose of our city was to ensure that the best resources go to the capital. A song by the contemporary band Omnipotent Youth Society from Shijiazhuang sums up our common reality:
Finished work at 6 PM
I changed out of the drug factory uniform
The wife’s making porridge
I go drink a few bottles of beer
Lived this way for thirty years
Until the building collapsed
Ah, the deep, dark clouds
Are drowning the view in my heart.

Like any other Shijiazhuang kid, options for me weren’t apparent. Nor were dreams. The general mindset was more that of succumbing to a repetitive daily routine. Not wanting to be confined in such reality, I decided to see more of the world, so I came to study in the United States. It wasn’t easy for me to choose a major for college because I had not found any subject that I was particularly passionate about. At the time, I was more interested in science than liberal art subjects, so I chose to study electrical engineering, which was a popular major at the time, plus I thought it would be easier to find a job with. The heavy engineering coursework pretty much occupied my time in college, and the years passed quickly. By the time I was graduating, I felt extremely lost. As a student, all I had to think about was to study. Suddenly, I felt like I was at the end of a lighted path, and in front of me, it was the dark mist of an unknown future. I tried to convince myself that I loved what I did and being an engineer was the correct career path for me, but deep down, there were some doubts.

Doing work here and there for a few years, I noticed that I was not enjoying what I was doing. After feeling empty for a while, I came to realize that I had fallen back into the repetitive daily routine that I tried to stay away from. Noticing the lack of a purpose in life, I decided that some changes were in order. Once again, I had to face the same question that has never been solved in my life — what should I do?

After a lot of time contemplating the question and weighing my options, the thing that came to my mind was photography. I remembered that I fiddled around with my dad’s DSLR camera growing up and thought maybe with some practice, I could photograph events or weddings and make a living that way. With this vague idea in mind, I then started looking into commercial photography, getting to know about exposure, composition, and lighting. Up until this point, I still haven’t crossed paths with fine art yet.

As I was doing some research on fashion photography, I came across Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen. Her images gave me a shock because they were completely different from any other photographs I have seen before. In my previous experiences, all my understanding of photography came from those overly saturated pictures of nature, night skies, and heavily edited portraits. There is a term in Chinese for that kind of picture – “honey water pictures,” meaning that these pictures are like overly sweet honey water. The first taste might be good, but a closer taste will reveal that there is no flavor but mind-numbing sweetness. However, in Sassen’s images, the human bodies don’t seem like humans anymore. They are deconstructed into shapes and become one with any other inorganic objects in the frame.

Upon further researching, I found Sassen’s photography work titled UMBRA, which is an elaborate body of work involving “shadow … anxiety and desire.” I was particularly drawn to some of the more abstract images, where the colors and shapes of familiar objects form a dance which transcends any of their original purposes. I didn’t know what the images meant, but I felt that there was something deeper behind it, something beyond my comprehension. The decontextualized colors and shapes went over my logical mind and spoke to me directly to my heart. They seem to serve no functional purpose, yet they appear to be so dense with meaning. That was the first time I was exposed to fine art photography, and I was deeply moved. It became clear to me that the strange feeling of this unknowable, unspeakable, and ambiguous fog was what attracted me and what I sought to understand.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Since I came into the art world without prior knowledge or experience, I didn’t know what I wanted in my works. As I got started with my MFA photography program, I discovered that my passion for still images has slowly decreased, and I moved more and more toward physical installations. However, to make installation in a photography program was not an easy quest. The schedule for the photography program is designed with a quick turnaround time for image making, and trying to produce work within that time frame was definitely a challenge. Furthermore, since most of my peers are image-based, I was on my own to figure out a path for myself.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Coming to art with an electrical engineering background, I am more interested in kinetic installations instead of still images. I came to create kinetic, time-based structures that teeter the lines between permanence and ephemerality, space and place, and systems.

My art practice revolves around installation works that explore the relationship between objects, space, and perception. With an unconventional approach to utilizing and understanding tools and technology, I construct spaces and systems that challenge established perceptions and beliefs. These installations are often meticulously designed to create a sense of disorientation, challenging assumptions about the world and encouraging a rethinking of our surroundings. I am particularly interested in exploring the ways in which our perspectives shape our understanding of reality.

Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
I would love to collaborate with people with different backgrounds to create artworks that take my imagination further. I can also work with people to help them actualize conceptual ideas through technical means.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://zhouxizhaoren.art
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/zhouxizhaoren

Image Credits
Yunwei Zhou, Zeyuan Ren