Yu Ji

Born 1985 in Shanghai, China
Lives and works in Shanghai and Vienna, Austria

Yu Ji works with just such experiences and somatic sensations, which she transforms into multifaceted representations of space. The focus is on the human body and its relationship to its environment, using an idiomatic palette of materials as a frame of reference. The encounter with such settings — for space is nothing else — producing an effect that is concrete and abstract at the same time, seemingly present while charged with geographical specifics and historical narratives. Many of Yu Ji’s works are the product of field research. Making physical interventions at selected locations is also characteristic of her approach to her work, creating intuitively experienced as well as psychologically charged images for individualisation, for free space, limitations and control.

Yu Ji’s work — which encompasses sculpture and installations, along with video and performative works, screen prints and collages — is based on the haptic experience, on the atmospheric and cultural connotations inscribed into a material and which appear striking in certain constellations. The cement, wood and metal that often feature in her works, but also the various found objects from nature and everyday life that she incorporates in her installations, have their own characteristic properties and tactile qualities. They appear warm or cold, organic or abstract, open or confining. In Yu Ji’s installations, they stand juxtaposed as dissonance or come into contact with one another, they merge together or absorb each other. The entire spectrum suggested by their appearance makes of them resonant spaces which are always also metaphorical.