Yu Weiying丨于潍颖
2020
Exhibition Catalogue
Conference
· Pacific and Asian Studies (SPAS) Conference
4/2020
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Hawaii, USA
· The 19th East-West Center International Conference
(IGSC 2020 Travel Grant Awardee)
2/2020
Hawaii Imin International Conference Center Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
General Store
Curated by YU Weiying
April 20 - May 1, 2018
Fort Mason Center for Arts&Culture
Can we still appreciate ordinary objects not because of their use-value, but for their inspirations and sensibility of the visual rhyme in everyday life? High art as accumulated mass production transforms the everyday object into "expressions of the extraordinary.” These objects are anticipated as visual form populating urban life everywhere. They become unpredictable when translated into various forms of artworks such as round-shape paintings, photo collage, and sculpture, which demonstrate our complex relationship between objects and lived experiences as well as memories.
The unique space of the Swell Gallery will be reinvented as a General Store . Artists in this exhibition, graduating from SFAI Post-Bac program in Studio Art, use the ordinary and mundane matter to create artworks that provide the sense of visual experience while challenging the commodity status of the goods represented to the status of the art object itself, emphasizing art's place at base, a commodity.
Artists: Yida Li, Yourong Zhao, Hang Yin, Kathleen Smith
Aspects of The Contemporary and The Mythic
Curated by Yu, Weiying
2018 The Diego Rivera Gallery
“Aspects of The Contemporary and The Mythic” features thematically-related mystery stories, legends, and anecdotes and function to consider aspects of time, space, and myth through theatrical and cinematic forms.
Two brothers, the gods of sleep and death, are wandering in modern society.
A man in forest is taking off one of his masks.
The keyboard warrior is enjoying his breakfast.
A brain is seeking its home in another body.
A man is building a secret space.
A body that remembers…but hides behind it’s face……
These films and videos in the show are about contemporary myth, a space of unexpected imaginations, and a metonymic world of realism, moving from interior to exterior. The images speak, the sounds comment, and the space becomes mysterious.
Featuring artists:
David Boo |Gígja Jónsdóttir |Lucien Jeanprêtre|
Jiaming Song|Huiling Chen|Yuanyuan Zhu
De Profundis
Curated by Yu, Weiying
November 3 - November 14, 2017
Art, as Oscar Wilde describes in "De Profundis", begins where imitation ends. Accordingly, can abstract painting and photography be perceived as rarified, as an uncompromising self-absorption, or does it manifest sensitivity through meditating on individual spirits and beliefs?
De Profundis brings together artists working in contrasting but connected ways to contemplate themes of time, place and memories, each working with aspects of the ‘Abstract,’ with varying degrees of referentiality. This exhibition endeavors to connect the practices of painting and photography through imagery, revealing the psychological, beyond the purely physical. Mimesis is suspected as the primary concern as it is replaced to privilege the psychic processes over the material world of the everyday.
Featuring artists: Jinning Wang, Ni Pan, Peiyao Zhang, Stephanie Baker, Tianfang Yu, and Zeus Zou.
2018
2017
American Typhoon
Curated by Yu, Weiying
Swell Gallery
SEPTEMBER 22 - OCTOBER 3
Under the influence of globalization, migration of peoples and cultures across borders has accelerated. This not only profoundly reshapes our economic, social, political structures, but also provokes various interactions, resistance, and entanglements between cultures. Here we propose an exhibition that recognizes diasporic Asian artists who are working and living in the United States but haunted by two cultures.
In a time when “the Other” is becoming increasingly problematic, this exhibition attempts to highlight the Otherness that is an integral part of these artists’ racial and cultural identities as they explore and create within new contexts, and suggest a repositioning of Otherness toward an articulation of a hybrid "in-between,” and a negotiation between diverse cultural space-times. Equally it will reflect the dialogue between what is innate within certain traditions of Asian aesthetics and how those sensibilities react to the relatively diverse pluralism of Western culture. It is the climate of "Cultural Hybridity "and its effects that is the focus of this exhibition.
"American Typhoon - Gallery List
Poetics of Displacement
Curated by Yu, Weiying
The Diego Rivera Gallery
September 11 - September 16, 2017
Globalization allows for a variety of utopian possibilities and opportunities to be imagined and, in some cases, manifested. However, cultural differences, socio-political constructs and how they interface in a dynamic and ever shifting plurality have its pitfalls.
Through creative engagement, artists are constantly occupying a shifting terrain of consciousness and environment. Artwork embedded with psychosexual, cultural and sociopolitical implications becomes a means of articulating and exploring a complexity of global human experience and identity. In these instances, the interpretation of one’s own reality is the point of exchange, transpersonally and transculturally.
Visual media is linguistically relevant as signals of change and emblems of their experience. Art is a currency of communication. This exhibition is a forum for such engagements and realizations. In Identity: The Individual and The Poetics of Displacement, Asian artists are displaced from home, and from their new position as outsiders they explore Identity, location and context. Through the works of Kai Cheng, Kuo-Chen (Kacy) Jung, Tiff Yue Liu, Zeus Zou, Haeni Lee, Ellen Qiu the internal dialog that generates from both separation from the known and consequent immersion into the unknown.
Gallery List download
Out of the Box: The Archive Now
curated by Yu, Weiying
August 17-28, 2017, Walter and McBean Galleries
“Archives do not simply reconnect us with what we have lost. Instead they remind us, like Warhol’s boxes, of what we have never possessed in the first place.”
– Sven Spieker, 2008
The archives have been dislodged from the SFAI tower, and have provided fertile ground for us. They no longer stay in boxes with labels as dead objects, and have started manifesting the “living” past and reality. For the artists and curators who participated in the exhibitions at SFAI, the memory and history are awake. For people who encounter these exhibitions archives for the first time, the contemporary art history that has happened at SFAI can be tracked. Anyone can develop their knowledge and think through primary archival materials as a catalyst.
In a digital age, the shifted form and storage of archive at institutions promote, on the one hand, more open access for the general public. On the other hand, to actually touch and experience the archive in-person is more unique in a way that is different from viewing them digitally.
This exhibition presents the archives by outlining a conceptual map of exhibitions at SFAI since the 1910's, and provides physical archival materials, video, and music from SFAI lecture series for an audience. Behind the main archives shelf, the hand-drawn conceptual map of exhibitions and the brief information from the in-process Exhibitions archives finding aid provides some literal identities of these files. On two sides of the map, the primary materials of curatorial projects from two curators, Phil Linhares and Hou Hanru, narrate their insightful perspectives on contemporary art history at SFAI. Additionally, the digital device with headphone on the table invites the audience to explore some of the digitized videos and music pieces in-person.
The show is affiliated with the project Ghost of the Tower (January 26 - September 16, 2017)
You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities (Carolyn Steedman). Arthur Brown had a thing for towers. The famed architect of Coit Tower, Hoover Institution Tower at Stanford, San Francisco City Hall, and San Francisco Art Institute’s 1926 Chestnut Street campus oriented our faux-Italian hillside around a non-functioning tower. There’s no bell and no lookout. Brown’s postmodern gesture came before its time and is now a famous home of ghosts. The SFAI tower also shrouds an indispensable archive of nearly 150 years of art history—spanning the founding documents of the San Francisco Museum of Art to early acid-trip induced exhibitions.
TOGETHER: THEN, NOW, WHEN
AN EXHIBITION ON CLIMATE CHANGE
SEPTEMBER 6 - 18, 2018
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
TOGETHER: THEN, NOW, WHEN proudly exhibited works by four exciting contemporary artists hailing from California, Mozambique, and New York, September 6 - 18, 2018 in San Francisco at Live Worms Gallery in the North Beach neighborhood, spirited by the Beat Generation.
Dove Bradshaw, Kai Chen, Mário Macilau, and Hannah Perrine Mode reflected on elements of transformation that offered contemplative perspectives on the unintended assaults and changes to our fragile Earth. Each artist granted the audience with their brilliance in this milieu of change. Exploring and unfolding change, social cultural shifts, TOGETHER was an art exhibition with a cause to celebrate and cross-pollinate with artists, climate stakeholders, and gallery guests to share and accelerate knowledge and action to save our Earth for our future generations.
TOGETHER was proudly affiliated with the Global Climate Action Summit and The Hum Sum events and conferences happening in San Francisco to address climate change.
In conversation on September 12th, visionary businesses embracing sustainability that participated in the discussion: Weiying Yu, writer and curator who moderated the panel.
Collaborative Project
re:home
curatorial assistant, collaborator
December 1-29, 2018 - Minnesota Street Project, Gallery 200, San Francisco
AKArt, re.riddle, and Collect for Change™ organize a For Freedoms exhibition exploring the plight of political and economic refugees in the San Francisco Bay Area - examining sanctuary city, homelessness and the flight of the creative class.
is a For Freedoms exhibition and community action, that examines how the broad societal crises of home Developed in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut San Francisco, city, homelessness, and the flight of the creative class intersect in the San Francisco Bay Area.re:sanctuary
http://www.akart.com/rehome
Isaac Julien’s Playtime
Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture
Oct.11, 2017 - Feb. 2018
Playtime presents three film installations by visionary filmmaker and artist Isaac Julien, each deftly exploring the complex relationships between people, capital and myth. Featuring Julien’s signature blend of immersive multi-screen installations and incisive observation, the exhibition engages viewers with compelling stories of art dealers, financiers, and migrant laborers, challenging the viewer to reassess the ethics of globalization.
Evolving Office: an Art Útil Project
Apr.17 -22, 2017,
The Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute
The Evolving Office: an Art Útil Project provides a space of engagement where visitors are welcome to hold a discussions, read, listen and even inquire further into Art Útil archive. In lieu of an exhibition, the office stages a laboratory and investigative space and the visitors are the users of the space. Art Útil as a concept, urges us as artists, writers and creative thinkers to reconsider the potential of art beyond limited notions of aesthetics, to reimagine the 'function' of art and its potential effects within society. Art, in this regard, can be a tool for social and political change that aims to offer a beneficial outome for its users. It is this direct immersion of art into a society and its engagement with various localities, communities, and peoples that makes a space for transformation and collaboration possible; in this way, useful art becomes an arena for action. We endeavor to transform the Diego Rivera gallery into an open, 'coworking' office space where visitors (both students and campus guests) are welcome to engage in personal research, host meetings, or spend time with the provided materials.
The project and exhibition are a joint venture between YBCA, the Asociación de Arte Útil, and SFAI. It is conceived as a contribution to the exhibition Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power / Hablandole al Poder, which is organised by YBCA.
