YUGE ZHOU

Love Letters (2022)—Video projection onto the facade of Merchandise Mart, Chicago

Commissioned by Art on The MART, Love Letters is a ten-minute film that was projected nightly onto the iconic Art Deco façade of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart in fall 2022. Colorful geometric forms and generative magnetic lines transform the building’s windows and columns into an urban grid, setting the stage for a courtship dance between two city dwellers as they navigate the labyrinth of the city toward one another.

Director: Yuge Zhou
Choreography: Hannah Santistevan
Sound: Ori Zur
Performance: Rebecca Huang, Xavier Núñez
Technical artists: Patrick Steppan, Mary Franck
Technical advisors: James George, Stephen Farrell
Videography: Big Foot Media, Viktor Gerasimovski
Lighting: Parker Nyquist
Studio: Mainstage Chicago
Curation: Cynthia Noble

Press:
Ocula Magazine: Watch Yuge Zhou’s Melancholy Pas de Deux Illuminate theMART
Outland Art: The Digital Nonmonument
Art Monthly (February 2023 issue): Letter from Chicago, by John Parton, excerpt below:

“A longing for an old home and the joy of a new one come together in a different way in Yuge Zhou’s Love Letters, 2022, a video projection spread across the enormous 2.5-acre facade of the Mart building on the downtown banks of the Chicago River. Part of Art on the Mart, the world’s largest permanent digital art projection, Zhou’s video shows two dancers – at times in clear focus, at other moments nothing more than dark silhouettes – ducking, spinning and weaving around each other, before reaching out to touch and fleetingly unite. Zhou, who is from China and lives in Chicago, has spoken of the work, proudly emblazoned across all 25 stories of the Mart – one of Chicago’s architectural landmarks – as her own love letter to the city. But the dancers’ expressions of longing for each other also resonate with her own yearning for home. Zhou has spoken of the work being conceived during lockdown, a long period when she was unable to get back to China, and of how travel bans and quarantine periods have only made a faraway home feel even more remote.”