Interview ： Who Has Stolen Our Bodies

Zhang Wei: When I saw the work “Who Has Stolen Our Bodies ？ ” ， it brings the unspeakable emotion on me from the soap objects. It is not only has something to do with the color and odor, but the memory in the life.

Chu Yun: I am always seeking something in the life which is not definite feelings – pain, happiness, sadness or memory, which these banal feeling exist in everyday life. I don't care these definite emotion (immense pain, happiness, sadness and wrath) which could produce the ideal or will.

Literally the things which change us not these monumental emotions, even not these incidents we could exactly remember. I feel those unmarkble and banality changes us everyday.

I can not really exactly explain my work and I think perhaps the artists is the last person who understand the work. It always takes very long time for me to think about a piece of work and it is long thinking process, but it can be very fast to realize it, and sometimes I even don't know what I can do with it. Afterwards it is long time to understand the work.

Soap in this work is not material and it is all. As the process to make the work, initially I spend my time instinctly to go through the life and do things. There is no any guarantee to make the process meaningful but what it needs is courage and to absorb any energy from the daily life. It is very hard to imagine that this piece of work took me all the time of energy till the language of the work was found. On the process to make this piece of work, I have never given up any details in life till one day when I realize the soap, which is between doing and not doing, between form and abstract, with a tiring feeling, I realized my works was landed and that is the process of how I realize the piece.

Zhang Wei: Soap is an interesting piece of object which is changing all the time on the process of making relationship with human body.

Chu Yun: To think about the products, and most of them is gone because of human being, and somehow I think it is life. In my another work “1607” is also about the “fate of the products”. In the work “who has stolen our body?”, soaps lost its function as object of product, and become a memory of ourselves(anti- monumental), it is like a moment in my life that I saw my conscience and wake up or abruptly lost in the front of the object.

Zhang Wei:  It is very difficult to make category of your work and there is no definition in the work. Is it part of the concept if your work?

Chu Yun: Maybe I do not want to make artworks to follow what another are doing. I do not want to make competition with them on the ideas, creativity, form or materials. I do not care things has nothing to de with me. Also these look reasonable or “good” are boring and suspicious, so I feel I should start from zero.

I did not put any barriers in my work deliberately, and try to avert these things which people think it is important. For these people who imagine to get some concept from my work, will be disappointed. Meantime some visitors will understand my work immediately without any explaination.

Maybe any thing which can be definite means it is limited. I only can say I am very care to ask these questions – “ what is art” and “ what is artworks”, to myself. In the work of “ who has stolen our body?”, I do not want to create a piece of work and I do not want to do a piece of work I can do. Apart from that, I do not have any definite idea or method. What I am doing is to commit myself to explore a space with more freedom and look for these trace connected with life and destiny, to give up the right to create and to enjoy and suspension with these things which out of control, appearing and disappearing.

(2004)