Solo Residency: Yusi Zang

In my shoe-box apartment, there is a bird that always comes lingering on my balcony. I know this because I can hear something cooing outside, behind the blind of my bedroom window. As soon as I try and peep through the tiny gap between the blind and the window frame, it flies away. I am never able to meet the thing properly. It visits my balcony often, but only when I’m not looking. I only acknowledge its arrival by its fluttering and cooing. One day I left my bedroom window open and went to the grocery. When I returned, I realised the bird had come into my bedroom. It left a splash of poo on a very intimate spot - on my bed, right next to my pillow. Now when I walk around my neighbourhood and see bird poos, on car windows, walls and on the ground, I think, “Is that the bird I know?”

The three works I executed for this residency; Bird Poo, 2020, Bird Poo on Car Window, 2020, and Cursed Present, 2020 all exclude the human subject. In the second chapter, ‘Rhopography’, in the book Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson pointed out that “disappearance to the human subject might represent only a provisional state of affairs if the body is just around the corner, and likely to re-enter the field of vision at any moment. Human presence is not only expelled physically: still life also expels the values which human presence imposes on the world.” In order to make the eyes discover the intensity and subtlety of things in the tedious life, my practice requires self-humility to downgrade the great human melodrama. I also benefit from the exertion of attention. The eyes therefore gain the ability to turn the trivial into gold.

The objects I depict or use are derived from the everyday world that I inhabit. The representation of the objects is authentically affected by the milieus I inhabit but cannot be derived from those. Gilles Deleuze once pointed out the effort of philosophy was that of “rendering representation infinite”, which I think also applies to the intention of art practice. Looking at the overlooked, through observation and meticulous transcription, I aim to extract the impersonal and imperceptible forces that are obscured in life.

Deleuze’s interpretation in Difference and Repetition reflects on the relationship between life and art making. In the face of the most mechanical and rigid repetitions inside and outside of us, we continuously extract tiny differences, changes and modifications from them. This is our modern life. Conversely, the constant replacement of differences brings vitality to those secret, disguised, and hidden repetitions.