Ye Qin Zhu

What is your working process?

CONSTELLATION was a collaborative process. I worked with Beam Camp City staff, the parks department, youth fellows and apprentices to whittle down my original proposal into what we see today: something that is fun and engaging for the staff and campers to make, and enticing for visitors to see and hear for each of the six unique pieces. The hope is for visitors to move through the entire island, following our constellation map on the QR code at the foot of each sculpture, and experience Governors Island through our carefully selected scenic locations and routes. Identifying the locations was so much fun! Shane, the Director of Public Programs at Governors Island drove us around on a golf cart to scope out the best sites for the sculptures.

For CONSTELLATION, or any public artworks I make, I use heavy-handed metaphors and symbols to impress onto the viewer an experience or visual language. Like a poem with a few non-linear but resonant words. Because this is a Beam Camp City project, youth get to take their personal projects home, but for a large-scale singular project, the thing to take home is the experience of it. I wanted the metaphors to be an important part of this experience. Constellations, for example, are cosmic metaphors for relationships and interconnectedness—a constellation is made up of stars in relation to every other star. The way we relate to learning, stories, experiences, and metaphors change over time as we grow. A work of art stays alive when it changes and grows with us.

Your work is a lot about healing. Why and how do you explore this while creating?

Healing is always personal, so there is no one way to heal. More than that, what may be healing to one person may be wounding to another. There are things that one can do to nurture the healing process, like holding space and listening compassionately. This works for ourselves and for others because it gives one the freedom to be themselves and to explore every facet of the cause of pain in a safe space without judgment. In some way, many of my works take on this spiritual journey and become the material record of my healing processes. At the onset of the pandemic for example, when there was so much external turmoil going on, there was also internal turmoil stemming from family emergencies and finding stability. One way I dealt with this was by starting a new body of work to contain and transform this anxious and nearly debilitating energy into something hopeful. I made a series of paintings called Fragments, shown at Moskowitz Bayse Gallery in LA earlier this year. It was a body of 11 paintings, all occupying amorphous shapes that fit together because they were cut from a single sheet. On each painting were pools of materials and thousands of minuscule brushstrokes. I spent countless hours meditating on the anxious and painful energy that has swelled up and transformed some of that into shimmering colored tidepools of brushstrokes.

For CONSTELLATION and A Universe, these installations bring to life blueprints from my own healing processes. Like the “Lotus Sutra” in Mahayana Buddhism or healing gospels in Christianity, these texts and songs offer spiritual paths for salvation. Or Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth or Fariha Róisín’s How to Cure a Ghost, they are blueprints for liberation, among many things, which is an important kind of healing. In the two installations, embedded in their structures are blueprints for centering oneself. The gourd shape of A Universe, for example, is a metaphor for the body/vessel/instrument, and the rain that activates the instruments may symbolize the stormy weather in our everyday lives agitating our inner states. So when it storms, the sounds from the windows grow louder and cacophonous. But rather than growing flustered, the gourd body is asking us to listen and hear the beauty of its inner sounds/thoughts. Holding still and appreciating what’s going on inside me while I’m going through the storms in my life is honestly something that took me a long time to grasp and I’m still learning this. I think paying attention and listening to ourselves is an important skill to practice because it cultivates one’s strength of conviction and character in the face of difficulty. In the sense that rain is a metaphor for that which we can not control, silence is equally as important as the possibility of rain and sound. The structure is a blueprint for healing strategies. I think of A Universe as a space one can retreat to and tune into oneself. A space for centering oneself, and perhaps healing.