ZI YI

A THING LIKE YOU AND ME

March 27 - May 1, 2021

Building a collection is a basic human animating impulse. Artist or not, many of us seek to extend ourselves beyond the body through objects. It’s a means of defying an end each of us face. Documenting aids the storage of memory and states of self. Zi Yim’s A thing like you and me employs video, assemblage, and trash to create a self-portrait. Discarded ephemera—used envelopes, tidbits of notebook paper, New Year celebration decor, and calligraphy pens—produce a representation of Zi Yi more fitting than a photograph or painting. 

Zi Yi’s deployment of mass-produced materials reflects her fluctuation between Chinese and U.S. ideologies as she considers the collective versus individual paradigm. Chinese symbolism and philosophy pulse beneath the surface of Zi Yi’s chosen objects, but she is critical when describing these influences. Personal artifacts are webbed together in Zi Yi’s sculpture to visually encompass a contemporary Chinese culture that is engrossed in consumerism and luxury, rather than historic Chinese principles of spiritual and economic oneness.

Written on the assemblage is the phrase “Consumer of (goods), Victim of Constructed ideas, which fantasize, Its own novelty.” Within the timeframe of Zi Yi’s upbringing in Gulin 古蔺, China (1995 - 2011), the idea of a collective state, or community-oriented exchange, began to be overshadowed by a new interest in globalization. Zi Yi’a web of repurposed materials interrogates this exchange. 

Zi Yi keeps Harald Szeemann’s curatorial methodology of “structured chaos” close to heart. The installation revels in the possibility of an exhibition as a continually evolving form, rejecting the exhibition as a static statement. Wang considers fixating on a single point of view irrational in a period marked by interaction through scattered, varied forms. We are here, there, virtual, deceased—a literal embodiment of past, present, and future.