Our 7th open call in honor and memory of China Residencies' co-founder Crystal Ruth Bell received nearly 600 project proposals around the theme Mediated 调和 from individuals and collectives from all over the world. The 7th Crystal Ruth Bell Residency is awarded to Jiayu Yang 杨佳雨 :
Jiayu Yang 杨佳雨
The entomophagist, Yang’s specimen, March 2019
Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan
Made in Ethiopia (still from feature documentary in production)
A documentary about three trailblazing women who navigate the bumpy expansion of the biggest Chinese industrial park in Ethiopia. The African giant has an ambitious industrialization plan. But is the China Model what it needs?
De Anima, 2021 (work-in-progress), Film Still
Clara Jo is an artist based in Berlin, whose work seeks to foreground performative and emergent aspects of otherwise static inscriptions of reality
I WISH YOU PLUFFY PLUFFY is a mixed-media fictional installation by Yarli A. The photo shows Yarli's wearable sculpture Baby You Can Go Anywhere reflecting her diasporas experience. (London, 2017. Performer: Hyojoo Lee)
YARLI is an artist of Eurasian descendant, who gathers the fragmented stories of Europe’s earliest Chinatown in the UK with its mixed-heritage families, then reconstructs the missing picture with Virtual Reality and physical artifacts (letters, drawings, sculptures). YARLI’s work will be exhibited at FACT Liverpool and Manchester CFCCA (2021-2022), aiming to investigate lost ancestries, heal colonial trauma, complicate Asian identities.
Video still of Ale, a young Lisu musician from Samoeng, playing the fulu in the coffee fields at dusk. He says he began learning the instrument to cope with heartbreak.
Live music is the soul of Lisu community life, yet master musician Alebaba laments that their songs are at threat of disappearing, as villages have hollowed of young people heading for the city out of economic necessity. In collaboration with Mimi Saeju, founder of the Lisu Cultural Center in Chiang Mai, we are making a digital archive of Lisu music through video and audio so that anybody can access the musical lifeblood of Lisu culture, wherever they are, even in future generations. “When we die,” said Alebaba, “who will play the music”?”
Nomadic Department of the Interior (NDOI)
(Ann Chen, Leon Eckert, Yutong Lin, Yufeng Zhao)
Film still from Eye of Heaven by NDOI
In Eye of Heaven, an experimental film documentary, the artist and research collective NDOI (Nomadic Department of the Interior) travels to the new Big Data Capital--Guizhou province in southwestern China. From the Eye of Heaven, the world’s largest radio telescope, to the erosion of limestone karsts, we take the viewer on a walk through the physical landscape of data and data-adjacent infrastructure in Guizhou. Tunneled mountains, natural resource extraction projects, forced migration of ethnic minorities to relocation villages present alternate views and records of obliterated histories and untold stories in an age of accelerated technological and economic development.
Still Image from the Video Fugue by Cong Yu
Cong Yu 余聪 is a visual artist born and raised in Sichuan, China. She creates digital films, garmented performances and theater as vehicles to explore ideas of family, female labor, and queer temporality. 余聪是一位生长在四川的视觉艺术家。她以数码影像、表演和剧场为媒介探索家庭、女性劳力和多样化的时间。
Still Image from the “A 2020 De-Gentrified Manifesto for 2050” a work-in-progress VR and single channel video screened at Apexart Gallery, 2020
“A 2020 De-Gentrifying Manifesto for 2050” is an experimental hybrid documentary presented in the form of an immersive 360 and single-channel video piece. It is a dystopian turned futuristic daydream that investigates the possibilities of de-gentrification and decolonization across parallel and intersecting histories.
What if you can no longer recognize something you once held dear? Uprooted is an interactive VR experience that follows the emotional trajectory of people in Shenzhen's urban villages, as their communities are forcibly transformed into part of China's Silicon Valley. By asking the audience to re-familiarize themselves with their hands in VR, we wish to capture the confusion and helplessness of someone who lives in a city built upon their demolished home.