The Phantom of Image: Zheng Yuan
Guerrilla Collective007
Program of 2025.3
Zheng Yuan currently lives and works in Beijing. He received his master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Working primarily in time-based media, Zheng often operates at the intersection of fiction, documentary, and investigative research. His work focuses on the relationships between identity and value systems within different historical, social, and political conditions. He won funding from the “Art Production and Exhibition Support Program” in 2022-23 of New Century Art Foundation and was awarded the Jury Award at the 8th Huayu Youth Award 2020.
His recent solo exhibitions/projects include “Bare Minimum“, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2024; Forward, Backward”, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2020; “Up in the Air”, Taikang Space, Beijing, 2017; Selected group exhibitions include: ‘Gaia Should Be Safe’, MACA, Beijing, 2024; e-flux Artist Film Award: Shortlist Special Screenings, New York, 2024; “Film”, Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong Arts Center, Hong Kong, 2023; “The Future is Here, Are You Coming?”, Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, Chicago, 2022; E-flux Screening Room, New York, 2022; “Between Sci-fi and Illusory”, MAXXI Museum, Rome, 2022; “Future Tense: Microcinema event”, Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, 2022; “Double Vision”, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, 2022; “Feeling the Stones”, Diriyah Biennale, Saudi Arabia, 2021; “A Long Hello - Huayu Youth Award Exhibition”, UCCA, Beijing, 2020; “An Impulse to Turn”, Beijing Inside-out Art Museum, Beijing, 2020; “UN/ CONVENTIONAL: OCAT x KADIST Emerging Media Artist Exhibition“, OCAT Shanghai, Shanghai, 2020; “OFFLINE BROWSER”, The 6th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, Hong-gah Museum, Taipei, 2018; “New Metallurgists”, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, 2018; “Long March Project - Building Code Violations III Special Economic Zone”, Long March Space, Beijing, 2018.
His works are also screened at film festivals and online platforms, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2025; Visions du Réel, 2021; Arkipel Festival, 2021; “Crashing into the Future”, e-flux Artist Cinemas, online, 2021; “Hasty Falling Time”, 5th floor, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, online, 2020; “Out of Blueprints”, Serpentine Galleries x NOWNESS, online, 2020; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2019; Kasseler Dokfest, 2019; 25 FPS Festival, 2019; Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2017.
和平里通关 Hepingli Playthrough
37min, 2025, China
Zheng Yuan
Hepingli Playthrough（和平里通关） is a pseudo-documentary that mimics a game playthrough video. Borrowing the aesthetics of text-based adventure games that were once popular in the 1990s. The film creates a fictitious world that connotes seemingly discrete moments from the recent past and the speculated future into a retrievable archive, wherein it parodies the irreversibility of history, resonating from remembrance to amnesia, crisis to banal, a dystopia to the chance of a new start.
In this simulated playthrough of a non-existent video game in the style of (and with original material from) 90s text adventures, an internal monologue reflects on the surroundings and state of the world. Non-chronologically alternating between chapters in the present and near or distant future, the player chooses between different options to progress. A nostalgic play on what we decide to forget and remember moving forward. Are you sure you want to overwrite this savefile?
– Loes van Keulen
梦中的投递 Dream Delivery
10min, 2018, China
Zheng Yuan
An exhausted delivery rider sprawled on the bench of a roadside park and fell asleep safe and sound. In the dream composed of a long take, laborers gathered together in a Shanzhai park in the desert where dynamic riders became static “statues,” forming a contrast with the speed and efficiency they pursued inexhaustibly around the clock. The all-star lineup of contemporary laborers revealed the other side of the Chinese economic miracle: In an increasingly homogeneous urban life infused with technology and wealth, new kinds of labor and social exploitation surface — byproducts of society’s never-ending mobility and a world of speed without rest, sleep has become a costly risk for these mobile people. In surreal and highly realistic dreams, the artist made an attempt to capture the elements of fatigue and anxiety in this era — ceaseless mobility day-to-day is frozen in the virtual world. At the same time, unremembered faces in real life deserve close-ups in imaginary dreams.
游戏 Game
17min, 2017, China
Zheng Yuan
The thrust of the work is the deconstruction of presentation and observation in different media, and displayed in nonlinear narratives: from the comparison between images photographed by cameras and computer-generated images to the track of camera positions in live sports on television, and then emulation of human eyes in first-person shooter games. The work intends to, by comparing these borrowed heterogeneous images with montage, unroll the mechanism, iteration, and recurrence behind, as well as the position and corresponding perspectives of observers. “How is the world represented by images? How does the represented world reconstruct the way we observe?“ It is hard to answer the question, Game is a humble attempt.
图像研究 Image Study
8min, 2014, China
Zheng Yuan
Image Study capturing of my computer screen. After zooming out from a picture of Roland Barthes smoking in front of his desk, a tutorial video on how to roll a cigarette recorded by the front camera of the MacBook popped out. Along with this “how to roll a perfect cigarette” tutorial, another window appears showing “how to create a perfect image”, where artists appropriates various “tutorial clips” from different contexts, from photoshop tutorial on YouTube to the making of a Playboy magazine cover filmed by Harun Farocki, and photo-shooting scenes from the film Blow-Up. Corresponding to these different versions of how-to video, the artist declared in the work that “I would only use a camera as a last resort,” indicating that in the world where the spectacle is always on the scene, there is no need to produce any more new images to create a film.