Artist Statement

The container is a video work I made during stage four lockdown in Melbourne. The long-term lockdown has made my biological clock confused, I usually go to bed at three or four o'clock in the morning. Recently, I have developed a habit of sitting on the balcony in the middle of the night and watching the CBD at the night. I realised that in the apartment building opposite, only a few rooms have lights, most of them are dark all the time. I wonder where all the people are, have they all escaped the terrible lockdown? The curtains have never been drawn in the rooms with the lights on, and every household seems to live in a container, all transparent and visible for me to voyeur. Thinking about it this way, maybe people who live opposite my building are also peeping at me because I never draw my curtains as well. We are all watching each other in some way but we never realised.

Artist Bio

​Born in Shanghai, now lives and works in Melbourne. Yuchen Xin’s artist practice explores the ideas relating to self-awareness, human conditions, and unconscious self-expression through various mediums including mixed media hand-formed object, painting, video, ceramics and digital work. The unique anthropomorphic characters she creates engage both her personal universe and the common moments in human conditions. She considers her characters to have aspects of absurdity, strangeness, and craziness like all human beings but meanwhile, still retain a lovable quality.