Yi Zhou, SPAZIO DI CONFINE

Room 2

Her works explore the roots of hyperrealism and neo-realism: on the one hand she draws visible and tangible forms from dreams and imagination, on the other hand she takes some surreal aspects from nature itself. Her works represent a complex synthesis of imagination, literature, mythology, philosophy and new technology, imbued with Chinese and Mediterranean culture. Videos, installations, drawings, all her works introduce the disturbing magic of virtual characters in supernatural landscapes as well as the ephemeral reality of life, love and death, through the symbolic language of the unconscious. Yi Zhou presents a vision of life that transcends time and space, with irony and lightness.
Carlotta Testori

My work was born in the virtual age. We spend most of our time on the computer, on the mobile phone or in front of a screen. Less and less in relation to the real, the physical. My works are located at a moving point in time and space, where past and future mingle in the present. As creatures, structures with a parallel life, where everything and nothing is possible without time, in a borderline and unconstrained space. Places, landscapes, scenes, and creatures that I depict might appear familiar at first glance. But immediately one wonders whether these things have already existed or are simply computer-generated. Whether they are based on previous references or purely generated by the imagination; whether the work could come from ancient times or from futuristic outer worlds, creations of a dizzying, unexpected and inexperienced feeling. And some sculptural pieces make us escape from the virtual present. But they are few, so we continue to live in a world in which too much reality, too many physical things could awaken us from the dream of the virtual present.
Yi Zhou

Yi Zhou was born in China and has lived in Rome since the age of 10. She studied between London and Paris, graduated in Political Science and now lives between Paris and Shanghai. In 2002 she held her first solo exhibition Y Game at Noirmont Prospect in Paris. In 2004 she created the performance Mountaintank at Deitch Projects in New York. In 2005 her works were exhibited at the Galerie Jerome de Noirmount in Paris and in 2006 she realised the project Three Cantos, Prefiguration: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, with a performance in Piazza della Signoria. In 2007 she held the exhibition Il passato è remoto anzi sarà sempre presente. Una scultura, un video, un anello at the Galleria Nicola Ricci in Petrasanta and in the same year she presented the video Avatar at the Venice International Film Festival. In 2008 she had the exhibition My Heart Laid Bare at Ooi Botos Gallery in Hong Kong and Hear, Earth, Heart at Galerie Jerome de Noirmount in Paris. In the same year the video Paradise was selected for the official competition at the Sundance film Festival. In 2009 her works were exhibited at Basel Art Fair, Basel Miami Art Fair and SuZhou Trou Color Museum of Contemporary Art.