Yuge Zhou: Moon Drawings
What does it mean to go around in circles? Something redundant like spinning our wheels? Or a waste of time?
Yuge Zhou marks time in beautiful yet not-so-fruitless circles.
Drawn not in pencil or ink but by using her body, ambulating with luggage in tow through snow during winter or sand in summer. Seen from a bird’s eye view, the artist is drawing the line, a concentric tracing of her steps that radiates from a locus outward to demarcate geographical site from nondescript space. The distance traversed, a sort of ideographic record of trying to get home. Both innocent and sophisticated evoking Harold and his Purple Crayon outlining the real world outside his bedroom, her ritual channels the Gutai, walking the walk as it were, her version of “Action Painting” or even the iconoclast Tehching Hsieh, who long ago, voluntarily imprisoned himself or punched a clock every hour on the hour for a whole year, to show her artistic process as the work itself through video documentation.
But her project also cites the lunar cycle as a cultural reference ingrained within her Chinese upbringing to symbolize her filial desire to reposition herself in relation to a fixed albeit celestial object as shared coordinates acknowledging her ancestral roots from afar. She graciously shares her journey yearning to return to the place she was born, foiled by a virus that becomes an act of poetic motion abstractly indicating how our planet orbits around the sun, like the hands of a clock on a wall slowly ticking away on its circular path.
And that specific moment of when she can finally be with her family. Proof that you can never waste time going in circles.