Hard Drives and Dreams - Virtual Screening and Discussion

“It was only after Qianfan suggested inviting our good friend, the video artist Zheng Yuan, to join the program for the exhibition For those who share mornings and evenings that I realized Zheng had also made a work involving Yuan Yi’s hard drives. Unlike my video—which strings together thousands of screenshots of me that Yuan Yi kept on his drives, filed by dates alongside his sizable and curated collection of films, music, PDFs, and his own footage and works—Zheng Yuan’s Hepingli Playthrough presents the drives as objects. Filmed by our friend Xing, the custodian of Yuan Yi’s hard drives in Beijing, the devices stand on a bookshelf as solemn, dignified, and withholding monuments, with a shine like obsidian.

On December 7th, I will be joined by Qianfan and Zheng Yuan for an online screening and discussion. Zheng Yuan and I will each screen excerpts of our aforementioned video works, followed by a conversation with Qianfan. Incorporating the time-zone differences, the globe in between us, and the internet as the substrate of this exchange, we hope to explore the affective intersection between analog and digital, when hard drives become bodies, and dreams become medium.” – Chang Yuchen

Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner - writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment (see Use Value) and publishing as a dandelion spreading its seeds. Yuchen was a recipient of New York Public Library Picture Collection Artist Fellowship, Queens Art Fund New Work Grant, Poetry Project Curatorial Fellowship, Huayu Youth Award, Luminarts Fellowship, etc. She has shown/performed her work at Walker Art Center, Beijing Commune, By Art Matter, Carnegie Museum of Art, Amant, Artists Space, UCCA Dune, Para Site, Taikwun Contemporary. She was an artist in residence at Smack Mellon, Asymmetry Art Foundation, MASS MoCA, Museum of Art and Design, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Yuchen has written for publications including Heichi Magazine, Press and Fold, Art in Print, and Randian.

Qianfan Gu is an art critic, writer, and translator with an extensive portfolio that includes publications in Artforum, Artforum China, BLAU International, Spike Art Magazine, among numerous others. She has received notable recognition, being shortlisted thrice (2015, 2016, 2021) for the International Awards for Art Criticism (IAAC). In 2019, Qianfan earned a Special Honorable Mention from the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) for the Incentive Award for Young Art Critics. Venturing into editorial roles, Qianfan co-founded Heichi Magazine (2020-2021) as an editor and has served as a co-founding publisher of Gong Press since 2018.

ZHENG Yuan (b. 1988) is a filmmaker and artist currently lives in Beijing. His practice operates between fiction, documentation, and essayistic forms while embracing improvisation and collaboration. His works have been shown at UCCA, Tai Kwun, the University of Chicago, Julia Stoschek Foundation, and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and at film festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Visions du Réel, Oberhausen and Ann Arbor. He received a master’s degree in Film/Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015.