Untitled #11, Daily Talk #9 © Yichen Zhou

Have you noticed any major differences between your traditionally captured photographs versus your screen shot photographs (such as those in the Communication series)? Are there particular elements that you pay attention to when capturing the videos in order to get the best possible photographs from them?

Most of my works are performance-based, usually, I prefer to present my works in photographs, which are more open-ended. I want my audiences to have their own interpretation of my work. The interpretations may be completely different from my original intention, but it will make the artwork more alive. It feels like I plant a seed, I don’t want to control when it sprouts and what fruit it bears. I believe artworks have lives of their own. In some of my other projects, I do have videos that recording the whole performance.

On your website, the photographs in your Daily Talk series are laid out in different positions along a webpage, rather than presented individually. How did you go about arranging the order when the series includes such a wide variety of images?

While I keep working on the long-term project Untitled series every year, I am also making self-portraits, street snapshots, taking photos of daily objects, doing performances based on my day-to-day life, collecting family archives. Then I began to edit this series of work into a “project”, calling it Daily Talk. With all these photos, I tried to create a context of personal history. I am interested in drawing attention to two coexistent forms of memory – personal and collective. What do individual thoughts and family history mean to society? Compared to collective memories, maybe personal history is more objective. Yes, It is a wide variety of images, but once all the images are in the context of my personal history, I honestly don’t have to arrange the order too much, it comes naturally.

You’re one of the co-founders of MiA Collective Art and currently serve a curator for the group. Have other members’ artwork influenced or inspired any of your own projects? If so, how?

MiA Collective Art is a platform for artists to collaborate. We usually have a theme that we want to work on first, then we invite more artists to join and make work together on the same topic. Not other artists’ artworks inspire me, but our ideas can inspire one another when we are all working on the same topic. The collaborative process is full of surprises. In our recent project, we are trying to present a scenario of the future in the year 2059 where a new type of virus is found. we hope to intrigue our audiences with a new way of thinking about what viruses and pandemics mean in human history. Ten participant artists are making works of the new virus from different perspectives, making the whole project more diverse than we expect.