Yuge Zhou’s Love Letters: Video Art Exploring Fear, Isolation, and Healing
Yuge Zhou: Love Letters Across a River
In 2021 she was rehearsing dancers over Zoom to film a courtship across the Chicago River. Since then her work has filled Times Square and travelled home to Beijing.
“My work is meditative. It’s rooted in Chinese philosophy, which seeks to find peace beneath the turbulence of daily life.”
Yuge Zhou, to Antakly Projects
Who she is
At five, Yuge Zhou was a household name in China as the singer for popular children’s television series. She grew up in Beijing during the second stage of China’s economic reforms, watching mass migration and the city expanding around her, and those years still shape how she thinks about movement and belonging.
She came to the United States to study computer science, then moved into video art and film, with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her method is collage: dozens or hundreds of clips arranged like a Chinese scroll painting, many moments happening at once, so that a subway or a city block becomes a theatre of strangers.
Alongside her own work she directs and curates 150 Media Stream, a 3,300-square-foot public digital art installation in Chicago, where she has worked with more than fifty media artists.
一Your greatest inspirations or influences?
Growing up in Beijing, where some of the most modern structures were built around the 2008 Olympic Games, I became more aware of the impact of architecture on a place, and of the accelerated rhythm of the urban environment. These transformations led me to see the transience of urban spaces: how familiar places can suddenly be made unfamiliar. I try to capture these ephemeral intersections of lives and stories in my work.
On another note, my work is meditative. It’s rooted in Chinese philosophy, which seeks to find peace beneath the turbulence of daily life. My aesthetics are also influenced by traditional scroll paintings, which always illustrate a compressed narrative, with multiple events happening at the same time. The collage techniques I use to create moving images progress through time and space like these scroll paintings. Combining scenes and moments creates an uncanny perspective that never loses sight of the individual components.
二Tell us a bit about your creative process.
A lot of my older work is improvisational. The process consists of travelling to locations, collecting raw footage and editing, and in that process I search for themes, events and interesting juxtapositions to assemble into collages. Most of the time I go to places without a particular mission to seek out the most photographic view. I carry with me the mythology of the places, but I try to be spontaneous and allow chance to happen. In Underground Circuit, for example, I collaged hundreds of clips from the New York subway to evoke the theatricality of mass transit as an urban labyrinth. When I set up my camera it was impossible to calculate what people would do, but the pattern emerged all the same.
My newer work is more choreographed, in that I play the role of both director and producer. Once I’ve conceived the concept, it’s about finding the right technique and collaborators. The more people involved, the more time is needed to plan the logistics. Love Letters, a recent video trilogy portraying a courtship dance between two people in a labyrinth metropolis, took two months of Zoom rehearsals and location scouting before we filmed the summer episode.
Since last September I’ve been a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s art and technology incubator in New York. With the guidance of mentors, especially my dedicated mentor James George, I’ve been exploring computer-mediated performance. We are focusing on the last episode of Love Letters, creating computer graphics that interact with the dancers’ movements. It will be shown in 2022 as part of Art on theMART, a large public digital art projection programme in Chicago.
Since we spokeIt was. Love Letters was projected on Art on theMART from 8 September to 18 November 2022, with computational animation by Mary Franck and Patrick Steppan, and the Joffrey dancer Xavier Nunez joining Rebecca Huang.
I’m also working on a large outdoor video installation reflecting on the history of the Chinese workers who built the transcontinental railroad, to be shown at this year’s ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Most information about these workers was deliberately erased from historical documents, and researching the project made me understand more about the racial and social struggles of the ancestors of the Chinese American community.
Since we spokeProject Unity: Ten Miles of Track in One Day, made with Hwa-Jeen Na, won the Juried Award for installation at ArtPrize 2021. It projects the American West seen from a train window alongside the recovered names of Chinese railroad workers.
三How has this year changed your creativity, or how you see the world changing?
The months of quarantine life have inspired a new direction. Like many other people, I have been longing for a sense of community and collaboration. I want to create work that is unifying rather than divisive. So I’m continuing to seek out collaborative projects.
四Who do you consider an icon of our time?
This past year, with the pandemic and the social movements, made me feel that there are many icons rather than a single person. I think an icon could be a community of collective resilience. Despite a year of divisiveness, I believe people are seeking ways to celebrate the goodness of our human nature.
五What does wellbeing mean to you?
A balance of yin and yang: input and output. Our culture, and the art world, values the pursuit of economic success and productivity. Everyone is moving in a hurry, which results in too much output. Global warming, stress and anxiety, and obsession with social media are all consequences. By appreciating and preserving nature, our connections with local communities, and living lightly on the earth, we can restore the sacred balance of life and create work with lasting impact, driven by humanity rather than short-term profit.
Trampoline Color Exercise
Every night of June 2025, from 11:57pm to midnight, the screens of Times Square between 41st and 49th Streets filled with her gymnasts: figures reworked from aerial camera angles in archival Olympic broadcasts, tumbling across pink gridded trampolines, their uniforms changing as they flip, the whole mass reading as primary colours and, loosely, as national flags in shifting alliance.
From the river to the moon
- 2021Project Unity: Ten Miles of Track in One Day, with Hwa-Jeen Na, wins the ArtPrize Juried Award for installation.
- 2020–22Moon Drawings: unable to travel to her family in Beijing during the pandemic, she drags a suitcase through snow near her apartment, and across Lake Michigan sand, to trace moons. Solo show at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, 2022.
- 2022Love Letters on Art on theMART, Chicago, September to November.
- 2023The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, acquires Love Letters (summer).
- 2024Artadia Award, Chicago. Moon Drawings in Reflections on Practice at 21c Museum Hotel Chicago.
- June 2025Trampoline Color Exercise on 95 screens for Midnight Moment, Times Square.
- 2026Solo exhibition To Afar the Water Flows, Today Art Museum, Beijing, 22 August to 7 October, with Moon Drawings projected on sand. The moons she drew because she couldn’t go home went home.
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Questions
Who is Yuge Zhou?
A Chinese-born, Chicago-based video artist and filmmaker (周雨歌). A child singer on Chinese children’s television at five, she moved to the US to study computer science, then earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She directs and curates the 150 Media Stream public digital art installation in Chicago.
What is Love Letters by Yuge Zhou?
A video series begun during the pandemic in which two dancers court each other with a wordless language of gestures across Chicago. In the summer episode they stand on opposite banks of the Chicago River. The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago acquired Love Letters (summer) in 2023, and a later episode was projected on Art on theMART in 2022.
What did Yuge Zhou show in Times Square?
Trampoline Color Exercise, a moving-image collage of gymnasts on pink gridded trampolines made from archival Olympic broadcast footage, shown on Times Square screens for Midnight Moment throughout June 2025.
What is Moon Drawings?
A six-channel video installation (2020–2022) made when Zhou could not travel to Beijing to see her family. She dragged a suitcase through snow and sand to trace moons. It was shown in her solo exhibition To Afar the Water Flows at the Today Art Museum, Beijing, in 2026.
