In early 2022, Yu Ji began a three-year sojourn in New York. She subsequently traveled to London, Berlin, Phnom Penh, Prato, and Leuven, until the summer of 2024 when she returned to New York to prepare for her first solo exhibition at P·P·O·W. The exhibition title is taken from the Cambodian folktale "The Origin of the Tiger," which tells the story of a king, his queen, an astrologer, and a minister who, in order to survive a perilous journey, decide to transform themselves into a tiger—the minister becoming the limbs, the astrologer the tail, the queen the torso, and the king the head.
The exhibition presents over ten new works, encompassing sculpture, installation, collage, sound, and video, displayed in the gallery window, and in the first and second exhibition halls accessible through the narrow corridor leading into the gallery. The works comprise two parts: one concerning her six-month life and work experience in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2023; the other continuing her series of works sculpting the flesh with cement over the years. This is Yu Ji's second exhibition related to her Phnom Penh residency, following her exhibition at the Maling Gallery Hong Kong space in 2024. This period of living in the tropical Southeast Asia is vivid, brutal, and imbued with complex longing, as depicted in conversation. Like the jackfruit used in Yu Ji's first work related to Cambodia many years ago, she carefully peels back the layers, revealing details bit by bit.
This interview was arranged the day after the exhibition opening and another performance by Yu Ji at Initial Research, a non-profit organization in New York's SoHo district. We met at P·P·O·W Gallery at noon. During the interview, the innocent voices of Cambodian children reciting "The Origin of the Tiger" in Khmer played in the background, interspersed with the sounds of visitors entering the gallery and the hustle and bustle of vendors on Broadway outside the gallery. Our conversation began with Yu Ji's first visit to the ACC residency in New York, recounted her two residencies in Phnom Penh, discussed her life and exhibitions in New York, and finally explored how she continues to engage in collective creation and collaboration after the closure of "Morning Space."
In 2022, you briefly resided in New York City as part of the ACC's headquarters. What are your new feelings about returning to the city a few years later?
My ACC posting marked my first trip to the United States. Although I'd never been to New York, its skyscrapers and streetscapes, so familiar from countless movies and stories, made me feel like I'd been before. Initially, it felt wonderful. Later, however, after being constantly bombarded with the assertion that "post-pandemic New York is no longer the same New York," I began to feel confused. It was as if I were lost in a flawed dream, a dream abruptly interrupted, compounding the errors, ultimately leading to the conclusion that I could never truly know what the real New York was like. Even though I'm here right now…
Following a year-long public sculpture commission at the High Line, I completed my first institutional solo exhibition in the United States at the Orange County Museum of Art. Each stay and return, through specific events and people, makes the city three-dimensional. Its charm, cunning, vulgarity, and even its stench, must be slowly digested.
Living in New York is different from living in China. Has this change affected your sensitivity to creative work?
I rarely think about creative sensitivity in that way. My creative cycle is quite long, and my current work in New York mainly involves organizing and processing materials accumulated from my previous residency experiences. This timeline is lagging. Like this exhibition you see, its content stems from the difficulties I faced between 2023 and 2024. After the residency ended, I presented the prologue, *Evaporation*, at the Maling Gallery in Hong Kong. The exhibition presented the works of all the artists who participated in the Cambodian residency (Casey Robbins, He Jingwen, Zhang Xiaochuan, Kobayashi Kojiro) in a collaborative format. This exhibition at P·P·O·W Gallery is the second chapter following the Hong Kong prologue; I am the narrator, and the other participating partners become the subjects of my description.
Could you tell me more about your posting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2023? This posting was different from the ones you had done in cooperation with organizations in the past; it was something you organized yourself and lasted for half a year.
It was indeed very different. Because it was spontaneous and there was no organizing body in the area, it was very difficult to implement. In 2022, I received a grant from the M Foundation to support my creative research. At that time, I had the idea of living in Phnom Penh for a period of time. In the end, not only did the plan come true, but I also invited several artist friends to live and eat with me there, turning it into a short-term residency project.
During this trip to the host city, you will also be conducting a children's workshop.
Yes. I believe many artists have had similar experiences. When you have children, you rethink how art is taught and communicated. What is creation? How can we become happier? I've previously tried collaborating with museums in China on children's workshops and guided tours. But guiding a group of preschool children you've never met before to complete any task within just one hour is difficult. I want to try a different format, or rather, something with more time, something that, from the creator's perspective, involves analyzing and refining my own working methods, to do something with the children, starting from the basics and gradually deepening their understanding.
Cambodia's education system is still in its early stages of development, and it is precisely this loose and imperfect nature of the local mechanisms that has given me the opportunity to try new things. Cambodia has many charitable research institutions and support projects in various fields. They are very friendly to foreigners and willing to let me try. I proactively contacted local NGOs, and after visiting some charitable educational institutions and attempting to communicate with them, I plan to conduct a series of workshops. These workshops are not for teaching purposes, but rather to explore different communication methods. They allow everyone to collaborate with questions in mind, which in turn prompts artists to reflect on their creative methods and thinking. Through the continuous practice of building communication, I will try new working forms.
What scenes during your time stationed in Cambodia left a deep impression on you and particularly moved you?
My first visit to the Phnom Penh military base in 2016 allowed me to rediscover what had happened there. I remember stepping into S-21 for the first time—it had been a school, converted into a prison during the Khmer Rouge era. All the evidence of the crimes remains—texts, images, bloodstains on the walls, and even survivors selling autobiographies and memoirs about the war. Everything was so tangible, so real, it felt as if ghosts were lurking everywhere. But just steps from the memorial were guesthouses, restaurants, a market, and the local residents living there; the everyday hustle and bustle made me question the reality before me.
Looking back at this brutal history, it was only a little over 40 years ago. The survivors are scattered across the world, now only in their sixties or seventies. How do they view their lives and their country's experiences, and how do they tell their stories to future generations? For those who have remained in their homeland, do they still often recall the past? This place is backward and impoverished; landmines still litter the area, hindering transportation and making subway construction a distant dream. While expanding, reforming, and urbanizing, they are also dependent on foreign support and imported energy. Even now, air conditioners, refrigerators, and washing machines remain luxuries for ordinary families.
During my first trip to the military base in Phnom Penh, I visited many schools, without any specific purpose, simply out of curiosity about their facilities and educational environment. Perhaps those memories were stored within me, and years later, when I had my own children, they were reactivated.
This first solo exhibition in New York, presented at P·P·O·W, brings together your work experiences in three cities: Shanghai, Phnom Penh, and New York. How did you come to think about the connection or thread between these cities and your works?
Looking back on my life in Phnom Penh two years ago, I realized that I dealt mostly with daily life. As for work, you had to work hard to find, communicate, and strive for it; do as much as there were possibilities.
My accommodation in Phnom Penh was a completely unfurnished shared space. During that time, I invited a few friends to live there. They included an artist friend from the US, an artist couple living in Tokyo, and their three-month-old baby. Looking back, I realize I was really asking for trouble… Living together is difficult enough, but it's even harder for a group of people from different cultural backgrounds to coexist in a completely unfamiliar environment. How do people live in a house with nothing? In a way, that temporary home was like a blank exhibition hall; everyone started from scratch, and life and creation were inadvertently intertwined. The visiting artist friends had to accept this aimless and challenging journey. How they shared the space, how they built a temporary home, and how they tolerated each other—these are the themes explored in the exhibition at the Maling Gallery. The gallery's constantly rotating, upward-sloping, narrow space overlaps with memories of life in Cambodia—the exhibition "Evaporation" explores precisely how people coexist.
Regarding the two cities of Shanghai and New York, one is my hometown, where I have lived for over thirty years, and everything there has shaped who I am today; the other is the beginning of a new phase for me, as New York embraced me at a turning point in my life, and I needed to find a new foothold in life.
The title of this exhibition, "The Origin of the Tiger," is taken from a Cambodian fable. How did you learn about this story?
Before going to Cambodia, I found a Cambodian folktale translated into Chinese in the early 1980s on a used book website in China. One of the stories was "The Origin of the Tiger." I loved it at the time, and later I also found Khmer and English versions in Cambodia. The tiger image appeared frequently in the story, and eventually it became the opening theme of the exhibition.
Returning to the artworks, while viewing this exhibition, the pieces gave me a sense of lightness; in terms of materials, they were lighter and easier to store.
You mentioned easier organization during our chat earlier, and I think that has unconsciously become a criterion for me. The past three years of living and traveling have made organization a part of my work. My suitcases contain not only necessities but also work materials and unfinished projects. Every time I pack and clean, I take everything I can, because I won't be going back.
After living here for three years, organizing has become part of my work style. The cost of living in New York is very high; you always see people carrying large items and rushing around on the subway and on the streets. You have to find the most feasible solution within your means.
The works Play Know Attention and Origin of the Tiger – CRUS were both completed in collaboration with your artist friend, Dong Longyue. You had previously collaborated on exhibitions at "Morning Space" (co-created with Yu Ji) and at the ICA Shanghai. Could you also discuss this latest collaboration?
Dong Longyue is a very flexible and interesting person. His creative forms are diverse; he can be a stand-up comedian, a jewelry designer, and a furniture designer. I really like this dynamic, so our collaborations can take many different forms.
In my previous works, I have also combined sculpture and furniture, but I have only used recycled furniture. This time, the chair in the "Play Know Attention" series was designed in collaboration with Dong Longyue. It is part of the sculpture and also has the normal function of a chair. The new work reduces the weight of the cement body. The body is weakened. The positive mold used to make the sculpture is directly cast into the sculpture body, and the body becomes the negative space hidden in it.
I'm very curious about your two works, *Untitled 240410* and *Untitled 240225*. One is in the window display, and the other is in the First Space. Judging from the titles, I guess they were created collaboratively with others during your residency in Phnom Penh. Both works feature a material that looks like dough. What were your considerations in incorporating this ingredient into your works?
The dough and sculpting materials are similar, both being powder and water. It is soft and easily shaped, and when heated, it releases the original aroma of wheat. My past works have also often featured food-related forms. The two shelf works in this exhibition both used baked dough, and the shapes were completed in collaboration with children. They were wrapped in two types of bags commonly seen in New York: one was a goodie bag made of rainbow reflective material; the other was an oil paper bag used to hold desserts in Chinatown pastry shops.
I had hoped to faintly smell the aroma of baked flour in the exhibition hall, but the space was too large and the aroma could not be preserved for long.
I did see recipes for celery in some of the works. In PKA - Is this not a meeting, there was a work called "Half Skin Half Meat" that I had exhibited before, as well as "A Flowing Feast" that you exhibited at the HOW Art Museum in Shanghai earlier. These are all works related to food.
Yes, I am very interested in the form and smell of food, and how people use ingredients. A large part of my creative experience also comes from daily life. No matter which city I live in, I always spend a lot of time wandering around the local vegetable markets, flower markets, and flea markets.
The exhibition space is divided into zones: the display windows and the first space are more public and have a social aspect. Most of the works in this section are collaborative pieces. In the second space, *Stone Flesh - Anserop VI* sits in the center, conveying a sense of sublimity. The other two works, *Stone Flesh No. 11* on the wall and the largest chair in the corner, form an interesting triangular relationship. I'm curious about your considerations in the layout?
As you mentioned, the exhibition space is mainly composed of three interconnected parts. On the viewing route, you first see a display window with a child-sized chair hanging on the wall. To the left is the work "Untitled 240410": the background features many children's individual copies of a portrait of Edith Piaf, and above, covered with tracing paper, are four original pencil drawings by the children. Although all depicting the same photograph of Edith Piaf, the children's drawings are all different, making the subject indistinguishable and hinting at the multiple identities of the artists in the exhibition.
The main space is relatively open, with artworks scattered freely, like a "playground." The children's voices heard in the exhibition hall were local children reading "The Origin of the Tiger" in Khmer. It was a recording of the sound of the children reading the story together on the last day of my workshop in Cambodia. The works in the main space collected many materials with distinct regional characteristics, and also featured different body parts. There were two chairs in the main space, one large and one small, made to correspond to heights of 1.2 meters and 1.6 meters respectively. Rotatable metal joints were installed in front of the chair seats, connecting to cement sculpture parts, each made from a mold of a real person's knee. A large installation on the left side of the main exhibition hall featured five children's legs. Hanging on the opposite side wall was a sculpture of a shoulder; the white plaster part was a mold of a fellow traveler's body, which then connected to a series of gray cement "flesh-like" shapes—an abstract treatment of the figurative body, and also resembling a healed arm after injury. These clearly authentic physical details and deliberately weakened bodily symbols appear in many works in the main exhibition hall; they are both the raw material itself and the new subject matter after being processed. This is similar to the portrait of Edith Piaf in the shop window and the different versions of Edith Piaf copied by children from the same photograph.
Walking into the small space behind, you'll first see a standing sculpture: "Stone Flesh - Anserop VI." The human figure features a classic sculptural pedestal, sloping in shape, constructed from intricately cross-sectioned wood grain. This is the largest piece in the "Stone Flesh" series to date. It clearly presents a standing posture, with missing parts of the body softened, emphasizing integrity—a contrast to the fragmented and blurred figures in previous works in the same series. The National Gallery of Phnom Penh houses a piece called " Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhana," which has undergone numerous restorations and reconstructions over the past century. The torso and limbs are completely separated, yet the reassembled form and limbs possess an incongruous harmony. During my time in Phnom Penh, I often returned to gaze upon this sculpture; "Stone Flesh - Anserop VI" is, in a sense, a commemoration of the many dialogues I had with Krishna.
The artwork located next to this sculpture is also cleverly placed. Upon entering the space, your first glance falls upon the sculpture in the center, and only then does your gaze shift to the sculpture on the side wall; you may need to go further in to see the chair on the side. It seems to guide you along a route that requires you to walk in, circle around, and then walk out.
The chairs were deliberately placed in inconspicuous corners to reduce the focus of the lighting, creating a museum-like experience: you enter an exhibition hall, an ancient sculpture is placed in the center of the space, with enough room around it for visitors to linger, and a chair is always placed against the corner not far away, mostly for security personnel. I tried to create a similar viewing experience for visitors as they entered the exhibition hall. This is a familiar viewing memory for me, a place I repeatedly return to for solace when facing real-life difficulties.