Facsimile Room

Yu Feifei | Facsimile Room

2019. 12. 8 - 2020. 2. 23

Installation Views

仍旧有人在真正的相爱，真正的相互怜悯，2019手作笔记本，档案扫描，羊毛，木，纸上油画棒，石墨 

Still, there’re people truly treasure, truly in love with each other, 2019Hand bound notebook, Scanned copy, Wood, Wool, Oil pastel on paper, Graphite34.5 x 37.2 cm

确实对生活感到了十分的厌倦， 2019摄影，喷墨打印尺寸可变

Indeed, I get so tired of life, 2019photography, inkjet printDimension Variable

Exihibition Guide

Hello, this is feifei. I am showing my new works right now at Linseed, Shanghai. The show is called Facsimile Room.To our surprise, a lot of non-Chinese speakers came to Linseed. Therefore we decided to record an exhibition tour guide in English for all of you.

I want to state that this exhibition is tailored for Linseed specifically. The building is located in where the French Concession used to be in the beginning of the last century. Where we are, the flat on the top floor has an intimate atmosphere to it. When Linseed came to me with the proposal, I decided to utilise this character and represent a portrait of a Shanghai man from the past century. And this man is my grandfather. He was born and raised in Shanghai to an industrialist family. Strongly influenced by 1930’s old Shanghai culture, he had deep affection of photography, western classical painting, sculpture, music, literature, and of course the western life style.

The show has been separated into two parts due to the physicality of the space. The first part comprises images in the staircase, two video installations and several prints upstairs. The second part is downstairs in the small chamber, with more images and found object installations. These works were all made within the last three months.

The yellowish image at the foot of the staircase, facing the entrance, is a facsimile my grandfather made in 1961, five years before Chinese cultural revolution. It replicates a head of Botticelli’s Venus, The Birth of Venus. It extremely impressive and amazing to me that during the Chinese culture revolution, my grandfather burned more than 2000 novels, pamphlets and notebooks but spared this piece from devastation.

To me, this replica was a threshold of art. Up to the 90s, there was still barely anything important or beautiful enough with a frame at my parent’s home. And also it's a representation of western art and beauty in China. Apparently my grandfather did not see the original work in Florence, and I have evidence to believe that he approached Botticelli via small scaled prints such as poster cards. Additionally he was an amateur drawer, so the face of his Venus reminds me of a mixture of oriental aesthetics and western idea of beauty.

Next we have two photos my grandfather took that we found during the process of researching among the remaining pieces of his replica. Among all the photos he left, these two images are the most mysterious. One of them is him taking a shot of his replica, another one is a shot of another picture that he drew, a Chinese beauty, to which I could not trace the origin.

Now we move towards to an iPad on top of the floor. A very short video, or to be more precise, a GIF. The video combines a series of images that I printed in 2016, my final year at RCA. Motivation behind this was that I, as a second year student, was asked to make prints concerning a pretty cliche theme—memory. At the time, I was researching on appropriation art. Naturally, appropriation plus memory, I ended up using my family archive. Started from then, I grew more interested in redefining forms of portrait. I think of this GIF as my grandfather’s portrait, a series of female images as a man’s portrait.

The other video installation in this show is displayed on a TV opposite the iPad. This video actually is a screen recording of me opening the file and scanning it to see all the details of Botticelli’s Venus’ face. The file is a giga-pixel image from the Google art project. Giga-pixel image is a digital image bit map composed of 1 billion pixels thousand times the Information captured by a 1 this exhibition, the transcriptions I use are all from one Russian novel, Leo Tolstoy’s  Resurrection. Resurrection’ story is about a noble man who seeks redemption for a sin committed years earlier. First published in early 1920’s in classical Chinese and with wide popularity it was translated into contemporary Chinese. Today Resurrection is not the most famous novel of Tolstoy. However, it remains very popular and highly complemented in China. The text is full of inner interrogation of personal morals and exposition of the injustice of man made laws. This novel is largely accepted in China because in the book, the class conflict between noble and the serf was highly intense, and the hypocrisy and indifference of the nobility was severely criticised.

I trimmed his underlined sentences and transformed those fragments into other lines. And then we created stencils, visual friendly painted layers, resembling skin or camouflage, to cover those original text. It goes through those semi-transparent Japanese paper, you can more or less tell what it was said, but you cannot really see clearly. 

If you are patient enough, you can get back to the pages of the novel, you can still figure it out what it says from beneath the layers. We also display some belongings of him such as hair wax and tools for his job as an engineer. And next April, we will create a bigger set up using mixture of found objects, stage props along with images and texts to enhance our narrative. And hopefully we can redefine the boundary of portrait.

After these making process, I figured that in this batch of work, the stencil,  the selection, the recombination, is art itself.Thank you again for all for coming to the show. Hope to see you soon

About Artist

Born in 1988, Guangzhou, Yu Feifei received her B.A. from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, School of Fine Arts and her M.F.A. from the Royal College of Art in 2016. Yu Feifei currently works and lives in Beijing.

Yu Feifei’s artistic practice is rooted in psychology and anthropology. She utilizes visual language to foreground the psychic repression and indulgence of desires, through which she  explores cultural identity, its origins, and evolution over time through the lens of cultural theories, gender discourse, and literary analysis. By reconfiguring and translating textual fragments, archives, and digital images, she seeks to articulate the psychic and visual tension among images as well as between viewers and images. In doing so, her works explore the boundary between movement and the static, image and spatiality, humans and objects.

Yu Feifei’s solo exhibitions include HBP XXIX, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2018; White Eye, Galerie OVO, Taipei, 2018; Lover’s Eyes, Jimei x Arles Discovery Award Nomination Exhibition, Xiamen, 2017. Her works were featured in Tank Shanghai, MOCA Yin Chuan, Today Art Museum, London Gas Work, the United States’ Ell and Edith Broad Art Museum and etc. She is the recipient of Art Sanya Huayu Youth Award, Madame-Figaro Chinese Female Photographer Award and Jimei x Arles Discovery Award Nomination. Her works have been included in V&A Museum’s permanent collection. 

END