The Courtauld | Wuhan Punk: Chris Zhongtian Yuan

What do we reconstruct a piece of personal memory that’s so intertwined with the memory of a collective or community? How much can we trust memory rendered and interrogated by trauma, nostalgia, media frenzy and cultural imagination? Chris Zhongtian Yuan’s 2020 video Wuhan Punk explores the thin line between memory and imagination surrounding the disappearance of former member of Wuhan Punk band Si Dou Le and founder of Youth Autonomous Centre, who was active between mid 1990s and late 2000s in Wuhan, China. The film unfolds with a narrator muttering in Wuhan dialect under the narrator’s breath, often overlaid with intense, frictional sounds, searching for narratives, anecdotes and fascinations surrounding the musician. Combining archival materials with atmospheric CGI animation, Wuhan Punk commemorates and rewrites personal nostalgia for a rapidly changing metropolis, and the city’s rebellious and resistant temper. Weaving together personal memory, historical account, jokes, anecdotes, and music/video clips, the talk unfolds the making of the film, and retells brief history of Wuhan Punk movement, intertwined with personal memory of the city.

Chris Zhongtian Yuan (b.1988, Wuhan) is an artist based in London. Guided by an immersive period of research and performative component, their recent video works have explored the hunting of a mutated species within the entangled web of ecology, human construction and migration, a musical medium’s supernatural channeling of colonial narratives, and the search of memory, resistance and nostalgia surrounding a disappeared Punk musician. These ephemeral sonic and narrative materials aim to rewrite and dismantle the archaic, oppressive power structures.

Recent presentations include: Wuhan Punk, Somerset House, London (2021); Wuhan Punk, 5th Documentary Exhibition of Fine Art Triennial, Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan (2020–21); Wuhan Punk, Film & Video Umbrella, London (2020); Banal Objects, DIY Aesthetics, OCAT Institute, Beijing (2020); 1815, K11, Wuhan (2020); Counterfictions, York Art Gallery (2020); Ghost Towers, Architectural Association (2019); City of Objects, Venice Architecture Biennale (2018) among others. Yuan is the recipient of 2020 Aesthetica Art Prize and OCAT Institute Research-based Curatorial Project Award.

Tickets are free, booking essential: https://courtauld.ac.uk/event/wuhan-punk