Yi Zhou - Works

Works

Yi Zhou creates large multimedia installation artworks that blend film,digital animation, photography, sculpture, painting,drawing, and contemporary music composition. Her works explore the realm of hyper-realism and neorealism: on one hand, she derives visual and tangible forms from the imagination and dreams, while on the other hand, she gives a surreal aspect to nature itself.

Her work is a complex synthesis of imagination, literature, mythology, philosophy and new technology and is impregnated with Chinese and Mediterranean culture. Her works introduce the disturbing magic of both virtual and supernatural characters and landscapes as well as the ephemeral reality of life, love, and death while using the symbolic language of the unconscious.

Blending ancient expressive methods, such as sculpture in marble and 35mm film, with extremely technologically advanced ones, such as 3D animation, Yi Zhou presents a vision of life, transcending both time and space, inflected with irony, wit and a stream of consciousness. Yi Zhou's approach to art is not only a multimedia one, but it also includes a scientific approach to art. In 2009, she has collaborated with scientists working with NASA, by creating a sculpture made out of aerogel, thus, creating a first collaboration between an artist and scientists working with NASA.

Yi Zhou held a solo collateral exhibition entitled “Days of Yi” at 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Many of her video works have also been consecutively selected by Venice Film Festival and Sundance Film Festival. In 2011, she was also invited to show her video works at the FIAC outdoor project in collaboration with the Louvre and Fondation d'entreprise Ricard. In December 2011, Yi Zhou has also done a 15 minutes' piece that she has written and directed for United Nations starring Jackie Chan and Clotilde Courau, which was screened at 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

DVF 2011

DVF 2011 is a 3D animated portrait by Yi Zhou that originated as a commissioned piece for Diane von Furstenberg. In a dreamlike sequence, the iconic Diane von Furstenberg blows out of her mouth in an anachronological order female icons such as Audrey Hepburn, Maggie Cheung, Michelle Obama, Wonder Woman, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Angelina Jolie, Charlotte Casiraghi, Mother Teresa, and even Diane von Furstenberg herself.

This work was premiered at Diane von Furstenberg's exhibition in 2011 at The Pace Gallery Beijing, entitled Diane von Furstenberg: Journey of a Dress. Instead of painting or photographing Diane for her portrait, Yi conceived of and created an original video work, music by Ennio Morricone, as a moving 3D portrait featuring Diane as an iconic figure from whose mouth other icons escape.

1280 TOWERS — PLACE VENDOME

When the Comité Vendôme, at the beginning of 2006, proposed Yi Zhou to create a public project for Place Vendôme, she based her reflection on the symbolic meaning of the Vendôme Column that gave its name to the square. Created in response to this symbol of sovereign power, Yi Zhou’s project is composed of two 8 meter-high columns, located on a diagonal axis with the Vendôme Column as the central point. Each of these two columns are composed of 1280 small towers that are placed on a circular line next to each other, oscillating between the idea of emptiness and fullness. Their shape, inspired by the Chinese chopsticks, evokes the multitude of Chinese population and its constant growing, and refers to an induced geopolitical signification. Like a human chain in which the feminine alternates with the masculine, the fullness with the emptiness held in a collective initiative that starts in each unity.

Built on the pattern of the infinite spiral, 1280 Towers continue the history of art and humanity started with the Tower of Babel that is more recently reincarnated by Brancusi’s Endless Column and Tatlin’s Monument for the 3rd International tower. Despite very different metaphoric significations, all these artworks symbolize the multitude, the universal, and the infinite.