Performance Course Visiting Artist Lecture #4
Yue Yuan
During the Exhibition, What Happens Outside?
‘A set of instructions is the primary tool we employ in the elective course Performance. It is a time capsule for a future course of action that we conceive. It is a system that activates ‘structured improvisations’, a term borrowed from the choreographer Trisha Brown, as we perform the action in the here and now, whether it yields a tangible result or a formless one. Yue Yuan is one of the artists who actively explores the potential of this format, giving various scores to both himself and others. His way of using it to open up a playful and poetic dimension in everyday life has fascinated me. He will share with us how he has developed his practice. Like every work he makes, this lecture itself will surely give us a surprise.’
Yuki Okumura
About Yue Yuan
From one story to another, Yue Yuan’s practice moves through performances, publications, and spatial interventions, inviting the audience to step into the narrative as a character. He once took a coin from the Trevi Fountain to borrow a wish; swapped umbrellas with strangers to exchange the sound of rain; and distributed invitation cards for an exhibition which will take place in ten years. These gestures leave almost no trace, except for an enigma lingering in memory. His concern is not with how the story unfolds, but with how each individual re-interprets it to make it their own. Attuned to the flow and transformation of stories, he reveals the personal imaginations that take root within each retelling. Like recipes: the earliest forms of open-source knowledge, stories offer ingredients that can be altered across time, place, and season to create endless variations.
He graduated at HISK (Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten) in 2023 and at the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (DNSAP) in 2019.
His work has been shown recently: La SIRA, Paris (FR), Fondation CAB, Brussels (BE), Roger Raveel Museum, Machelen (BE), Le Botanique, Brussels (BE), Image/imatge centre d’art, Orthez (FR), Super Dakota, Brussels (BE), Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris (FR), La Compagnie, Marseille (FR) Blanco, Ghent (BE) SETU Festival, Elliant (FR) Bregenz Biennale 2022 (AT)
He is the founder of galerie grand verre and B09K.
https://www.yuanyue.ws
About the Performance Course at the Academy
Inaugurated in 2022, the Performance Course is an inter-department elective course for the 3rd year bachelor and master’s students of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, tutored by PhD researcher Yuki Okumura. Aiming at opening up one's working process to chance through instructed actions after conceptual art, it focuses on the artist's doing rather than showing, exploring performance as a way of self-reflection rather than that of self-expression.
Image: Yue Yuan’s studio at HISK, photo by the artist, 2023