Chu Yun
The Mind of Things
Mirrored Gardens, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

Chu Yun’s latest project at Vitamin Creative Space’s Mirrored Gardens was more than a mere exhibition; it was a holistic experience, one of uncertainty, opaqueness, and subtlety. Titled “The Mind of Things,” the exhibition didn’t elaborate much on the “things”; rather, the four assembled works pointed to an elusive “mind” pleasantly distant from fraught reality. The exhibition prompted an introspective look at seemingly mundane visual and bodily experiences that the artist detached from standardized ways of being.

The gallery’s first room gave the impression of a set in which the idea of normality was simultaneously being constructed and deconstructed. Greeted with a punch clock and a stack of white cards adjacent to the gallery entrance, one could engage a time and space of one’s own by “clocking in” as if at the office. This piece, An Ordinary Moment (2018), set the tone of the exhibition by re-enacting but also interrogating a daily routine. The time stamp punched on the card marked a unique moment during a given individual’s visit to the show. Yet, removed from the context of labor, where recorded time translates to remuneration, the act of punching a time card in An Ordinary Moment was also arbitrary—the numbers registered a useless temporal parameter.