Chu Yinhua is a photographic scholar and artist. Her photographs are unfettered by traditional notions of “reproducing the moment.” She is cognizant of how technological progress has increased our reliance on our sense of sight by bringing us cameras, cell phones, computer screens and so forth. Consequently, her recent works typically feature “visual apparatuses.” Connected to people’s perceptual experiences as their bodies move through cities and to the ambiguities found in the realms where recorded images and memories overlap, these tools extend audience members’ desire to look.
Rather than merely allowing their beholders to effortlessly and passively see something, Chu’s works hold out the hope that viewers will use their bodies to participate in the “process of looking.” Consequently, her shows always feature special equipment that allows the audience to see images in different ways. Furthermore, this equipment itself becomes part of a process of conversion, advancing more possible interpretations of the works of art.
For her 2010 project Traveling Home she used sets with model furniture to recreate her student lodgings in England. What’s more, through the windows and doors of these sets we see images of actual street scenes at the locations, culled from Google Street View. The photographs in Traveling Home are filtered through the artist’s memories of her experiences in Britain and then reconstructed. Hence, the images exist in a special realm between the “space of installation” and the “space of memory.” What’s more, at the show the works were presented via slide viewers, so that the viewing public had to get close to see them. As they peered into her works, they would find themselves slipping into a space of memory where there was no divide between the actual and the virtual.
Her 2013 show Hopscotching Tainan extended her earlier use of apparatuses but turned it toward the local in Taiwan, heightening viewers’ sense of participation. Here, audience members were no longer passive viewers but rather were made to participate in a game whose rules were determined by the work of art. Through their participation, they themselves became part of the art.
Likewise, rather than showing in a traditional art museum or gallery, she chose to place her exhibit in an abandoned public space near a bookstore. The choice to leave the “white box” of a gallery for a place more accessible to the masses helped to break down the boundaries around the art and bring it into everyday life. Playfully, via a map of Tainan that she drew herself, she allowed the people of Tainan to refamiliarize themselves with their own city via a multilayered approach that had them experiencing both the strange and new (because the artist had fabricated the scenes of Tainan) and the familiar (because those fabricated scenes drew from actual images of the city).
Generally speaking, Chu uses tools and games to enhance her audiences’ sense of initiative and sense of experiencing their own bodies. Even more importantly, like a film director, she creates her own landscapes, inserting elements from her memory as well as from the locales themselves, thus positioning her work between the virtual and the real.
Through her work, we can observe how the boundaries of photography are gradually eroded as she introduces more apparatuses and interactive game elements. Although she is still a photographer, she no longer has a photographer’s focus on choosing images from the stream of life occurring before her or in finding rich symbolism in the moment. She is more akin to a postmodern artist, using mechanical devices and the arrangement of items to “construct” an image, casting skepticism on traditional photographic reproduction and creating images with multiple layers of meaning.
In today’s digital age, we find ourselves growing numb to a never-ending barrage of images. Yet Chu, through the use of visual apparatuses, offers us and our dulled senses new multifaceted possibilities as we view her work.
Doll House #1, 2016 The installations’ differing angles make us change the way we view them. Unlike Chu’s earlier works, which were reimagined photographs, here toy furnishings were arranged within the installations, creating a sense of something strange yet familiar.
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