DECLARE: Yan Zhou

What does it mean to be contemporary? We asked all eleven of the artists in the show to give us their thoughts, collected in our DECLARE blog series.

Yan Zhou is a Chicago - based artist, He received his BFA from the China Central Academy of Fine Art in 2012 and his MFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. His work challenges the boundary between media and reflects on people’s perception of daily life. He is interested in exploring the technological horizon to find innovative modes of art production that collect and transcend contemporaneity. His current project involves a series of artworks made in Unity and displayed via various formats from video installation to VR interactive. He see the series as an investigation of the media, once seen both as tunnel that connects and as boundary that distinguishes the real and the simulated, that is itself becoming a hyperreal condition in which both ends merge. With the television set - both as illusory window and as furniture - as the reference point, a different kind of was involved: between the three dimensional illusion of the image, the flatness of the screen, and the different three- dimensionality of the apparatus. When asked what contemporary meant to him, he responded: