Thesis 2024 / Steven Xiaorui Yu | Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Thesis 2024 / Steven Xiaorui Yu

Image of one of Steven's photographs exhibited in his thesis work. The photograph shows an airmchair up against the exterior of a building. The chair has been redacted and is instead shown in black with white Chinese characters that describe the chair.

My installation is a combination of three parts.

  1. On the wall there are images digitally inkjet printed on the paper made by myself recycled from all the previous photographic prints I have made. All the images depict chairs, stools, couches, or some kinds of seats, while the image areas of the chair were replaced by a textual description of the item.
  2. In front of the prints there is a chair that I have been sitting on for more than a year, and its form has been modified into my own personal sitting position. People are welcome to interact with the object however they want without breaking it.
  3. Set directly in front of the chair object is a projection box constructed with wood panels and covered with handmade paper. A video displays found footage showing the interaction between people and chairs, with flashing frames of non-functioning chair images.

The paper on the box and the paper on the wall are the same type of paper, and both the description of the objects on the prints and images of the non-functioning chairs were generated by generative AI. With the positioning of the box and the chair, people must somehow have some interaction with the chair to view what is happening with the projection.

This work focuses on my personal interest in chairs and is a conclusion of my practice in full-time art making. Objects and forms that function as chairs are around us almost everywhere. A chair is an object that, beyond its functional use, suggests interaction, gesture, and human relationships. Chairs have been used by many artists to signify the human form and to represent social gestures. My work is in dialogue with these past practices and continues this rich conceptual exploration of the chair as a dynamic, generative object and idea.

In the production of this work, I attempt to obscure the actual images of commonly recognized chair shapes and replace them with different abstract concepts of chairs based on my observations and experiments. I am reversing our common perspective of chairs by using abstract texts – in the prints; offering body interactivity – with the modified chair object; and revealing human gesture – in the found footage. The AI generated images also contribute to this aim by referencing “real” chairs but being non- functional.

As a conclusion of my past practices, I have tried to reuse and recycle all the materials from my previous productions of works, the objects that I have constantly used when making those works, and the images that I have collected, saved, but never used. There are no specific requirements or background information that the audiences need to know previously; I rather intend to open a conversation of curiosity about what a chair is, what a chair could be, and what a chair has never been.

Instagram: @ a_lonely_taro

Tags
MCAD MFA
MFA
MFA Thesis 2024