Yuan Keru 袁可如

Yuan Keru is a visual artist and filmmaker who was born in 1990 in Hangzhou, China and graduated with a Masters in fine art from the School of Inter-Media Art at China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, in 2013. She currently lives and works in Shanghai. Her artistic practice focuses on exploring the act of painting, spatial rhythm and narratives in video, combining the emotive experience with history, mythology, dreams and so on. By drafting novels, breaking up the text structure, setting costume scenes and preparing semi-improvised performances and conversations, she endows video with senses of cinema and glamours of drama. Her works always have a strong taste of postmodern mysticism, and the seemingly melancholic, violent and dark themes are often immersed with warmth and poetry. By creating a surreal world of images, she reflects the loss of belonging and spiritual thinking sensatively with sophisticated logics and human energy field.

 

Her film Fleeting Strangers has been selected to Los Angeles Chinese Film Festival (2017). Her debut full-length movie The Symposium was premiered at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing (2016). She was nominated for the Huayu Youth Award of Art Sanya (2014), spoke at Art Basel Hong Kong 2013 for the panel The Diamond Generation moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and later participated in the Film sector at Art Basel Hong Kong (2016), and her work was featured on the cover of the literary magazine Chutzpah!, the 16th issue (2013). Her works have also been exhibited in Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum (M21), Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM), Today Art Museum, NordArt (2016), Helsingin Juhlaviikot (2015), I SEE International Video Art Festival (2015), Photo Shanghai, Jimei × Arles: East West Encounters International Photo Festival (2015), Get It Louder (2014), The 10th Beijing Independent Film Festival, etc.