YUGE ZHOU

Love Letters (summer), 4'28" excerpt from a 8'40" video, 4K, 2020

Love Letters (winter), 2’16” excerpt from a 7’40” video, 4K, 2021

Permanent collection of Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago

Love Letters portrays a courtship dance between two people in a labyrinth metropolis. They improvise a style of wordless language that no person outside of their relationship could understand. It is inspired by the collective experiences of isolation and separation felt by many during the global pandemic. The summer episode features two dancers standing on the east and west banks of the Chicago River, sending messages to one another from afar using gestures, against the industrial backdrop of the city’s South Side neighborhood. In the winter episode, we watch from above a playful chase between the dancers on a multi-axis pier during a snowstorm. The video series emphasizes the traditional Chinese concept of “Yuan 缘”, a fateful intersection leading to a relationship with an uncertain future.

Director: Yuge Zhou
Choreography: Hannah Santistevan Movement artists: Sam Crouch; Rebecca Huang

Text from exhibition essay by Asha Iman Veal, associate curator at MoCP:

“Zhou’s (summer) scene introduces the young pair (played by Sam Crouch and Rebecca Huang) who are separated from one another across opposite banks of a postindustrial midwestern US river, and wear monotone costumes of respective blue and red. The physically distanced lovers signal to one another by full body gestures and dance motions. They improvise a style of wordless language that no person outside of their relationship could understand. Landscape and architecture are supporting characters in the relationship on screen, situating the characters’ bodies in distinct yet unidentifiable milieus. Offering an entirely dissimilar vantage, Zhou’s (winter) video uses aerial-view technology to record a choreographed, walk-chase between the two dancers who remain identifiable by their respective colors even in protective winter clothes. Zhou explains that the two episodes “emphasize the traditional Chinese concept of ‘Yuan 缘’ as a fateful intersection leading to a relationship with an uncertain future.” She was also influenced by the sequential style of American filmmaker Richard Linklater’s romances Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013).

Before working as a visual artist, Zhou came to live in the United States as a technology student slightly more than ten years ago. Her experience of separation from loved ones, across an entire continent and ocean, became more universally relatable the year she conceptualized and produced Love Letters during the pandemic lockdowns when so many in-person relationships ceased.”