An Interview With Yu Z.
June 2025
Yu Z.
@jiao.jiaoo_ @_littledeeeer
Yu Z.
Architectural designer, Free-lancer Writer, Multi-disciplinary Artist.
Yu’s past practice and personal research allowed her possess an interdisciplinary mindset and vision based on her architectural background. Both text and image are her tools or masques to make the abstract inner melody visible, starting from “architecture” as a discipline, furtherly extending to the attention, research and practice of broader propositions. Her exploration and practice involve architecture, interior design, exhibition space planning & design, space creative planning, multimedia art installations, etc.
She is knocking at the door of stage art in her own way, a completely new while attractive field to her. She said, “To feel and to catch the hint of fates, then take the road that is destined to go.” If, as she believes, “I am what I created, dynamically”, then these diverse explorations, thinking and practices may make her world broader.
“皎皎jiaojiao” is central to your practice. Beyond its poetic origin, how does it function as a conceptual and artistic tool in your work?
YZ: “皎皎jiaojiao” is a constellation of works scattered across disciplines，an ongoing personal experimental project， an ever-unfolding personal experiment, a living inquiry.
“皎皎jiaojiao” is my tool for exploring the world, my response to the external, a projection of the inner self, a disembodied stream of thought — the embodiment of my consciousness and perception. It aspires to exist freely in a place without time or space, a homogenous realm beyond language and the existing systems of human description. Like a fragment adrift in the void, a ghost wandering everywhere.
More concretely, it serves both as a symbol and a guide that shapes my foundational understanding and aesthetic of creation, while also functioning as a collection of my works.
Your background spans architecture, photography, and writing.
Was there a defining moment or project where you realized these disciplines could merge?
YZ: I believe that the arts are fundamentally interconnected — their boundaries are porous, their languages resonant. I merely happen to possess the tools to articulate myself through certain forms. Whether through design, photography, or writing, each practice becomes a medium through which I externalize aspects of the self. These expressions are not separate from me; they are my extensions, my reflections, each one revealing a different facet of my interiority. They offer a release valve for the excess of sensation, for a surplus of affect that seeks form.
Architecture, however, occupies a somewhat distinct position. Unlike other creative disciplines that can remain introspective or even solipsistic, architecture is necessarily enmeshed in the social. It implicates material systems, mobilizes collective resources, and thus demands a more pronounced ethical consciousness. It cannot remain entirely within the realm of the personal. “Paper architecture,” by contrast, exists in a more suspended state — liberated from the burdens of construction, it escapes the gravitational pull of matter. It becomes speculative, contemplative, and, in some sense, free. John Hejduk’s work is exemplary in this regard: his architectural drawings and textual narratives operate simultaneously as spatial inquiry, poetic fiction, and philosophical reflection. Even when stripped of architectural context, his manuscripts resonate as artworks in their own right — poignant, lyrical, and deeply affecting. What overflows from them is not just meaning, but a kind of metaphysical poetics. And yet, they remain tethered to the architectural imagination.
In one of my more experimental projects, The Garden of Forking Paths, I attempted to render into space the experience of reading Borges — to give form to the atmosphere of his words, the flickering spaces conjured by his prose, the dim images that linger in the mind’s eye. The process felt like developing a negative into a photograph：latent impressions slowly made visible. I employed the same tools I use in architectural design — starting with a floor plan, slowly constructing the imagined space — stepping into Borges’ literary world as an architect, rebuilding it in my own way.
More and more, I’ve come to realize that regardless of the medium, a single underlying motif threads through all of my work. The same emotions resurface, again and again. They echo through the works I am drawn to, and through the forms I instinctively gravitate toward in making. Perhaps this recurring thread is a trace of my subconscious — my deep-seated perception of the world, the tonal ground of my aesthetic.
All of it ties back to the self. Architecture, language, image-making — they are each a resolute enactment of my inner will. Though they wear different forms, they are expressions of the same core, and all roads, in the end, return to me — to lived experience as source and center.
Having lived in different cultural contexts, how has each location—China, the U.S., and beyond—shaped your approach to space and artistic narrative?
YZ: Chinese is the language I was born into — it is not merely a mode of communication, but something intrinsic, interwoven with the world of my earliest perceptions. It forms the texture of my being, grown into my bones and breath.
New York is the city where I have lived the longest outside my home country, and it has profoundly reshaped me, stretched the contours of how I imagine the world. I believe it was in New York that I first opened my eyes — truly — to the realm of art. The city, with its vast freedom, its boundless tolerance, its kaleidoscopic diversity, offered me a near-vacuum in which I could grow without resistance. Like the ocean cradling a single drop of water, it held all my fervent longing. Its richness — of density, of movement, of life — gave me a foundation firm enough to hold my own volatility.
If I wished, I could vanish into the crowds of Manhattan in an instant. In this city-machine that hums through night and day, no one stops to look. In the eyes of its millions, I was unseen — and in that invisibility, I discovered something precise: I was only ever myself. Solitary, but utterly free.
New York is also a city made for walking. I often wandered aimlessly through its streets. In Manhattan, I was never afraid of losing my way — not only because of its logical grid and numbered streets, but because landmarks like the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center were always within sight, anchoring the sky. They were simply there — constant, like a silent reassurance.
And yet, the farther I drifted from the world of my native language, the more vividly I felt the imprint of Chinese — not as limitation, but as a deep cultural undercurrent. In New York, I came to know the Chinese language anew. When I left the city, I whispered to myself: “New Yorker in soul.”
When I was still an undergraduate — not yet twenty — I chose to study abroad in Turin, a city in northern Italy. I spent more time wandering across Europe than attending class, pulled by a curiosity that refused containment. I remember one moment clearly: walking up the worn steps of a historic building in Turin, my hand brushed the cool, curling stone of a Baroque balustrade. Something stirred — the original flame that drew me to architecture flickered alive again.
These layered experiences — of education, of drifting between cultures — only deepened my sense of dislocation. I don’t belong to any one place. I’ve always stood a little outside the frame, a quiet observer. Even as a child, I never felt a deep-rooted attachment to a specific place; I was always looking elsewhere — farther. I’ve never wanted to anchor myself anywhere. I want to remain in motion. This wandering, both physical and emotional, mirrors the way I move between disciplines. It is one continuous gesture.
I am, and perhaps always have been, a bystander — and I have come to love it.
If you had to describe your creative process as a structure or spatial form, what would it look like?
YZ: Continuous Plateau. The Waves. A Veil.
The underground nest of ants. The porous cheese.
The opposite of a hierarchical tree structure.
Piecing pieces of cloth with irregular shape.
To connect the Archipelago into a Newland.
What does a day in your studio look like? Do you have rituals or habits that shape your work?
YZ: I feel like I am in the cave of my own or underwater in my home studio. I try to live with a regulated daily schedule, while I realized that actually I enjoy the feeling that there is time lag between me and the world, sometimes. It makes me feel safe, and being loosely connected with the outer world so that I could escape or get away at any time, if I want.
I often describe my way of working as entangled and fluid, bordering on chaotic. It’s difficult for me to strictly plan or execute tasks at precise hours — doing so often creates pressure rather than clarity. I never make detailed schedules. Instead, I carry a loose sense of what needs to be done on a given day or over a period of time. This ambiguity actually allows me to feel more relaxed, and in turn, more focused.
What I do at any moment largely depends on my mood or how I feel in that instance. But I can only truly commit myself to one thing at a time — when I am in a creative phase, all my attention and energy are absorbed entirely by that one process. I often operate in what I call a “background mode”: even if I appear not to be working, or not directly engaged with the project, my subconscious continues to simmer with ideas. Thoughts brew like an untamed stew. I’ve come to understand that this continuous, indistinct way of thinking seeps into the work itself like a ghost — quietly but unmistakably present.
Generally speaking, I reserve the early mornings for activities that require concentration and thought, such as reading. That’s when my mind feels the most lucid, best suited for tasks involving logic or structure. Afternoons and evenings, by contrast, are better for sensory and visual work — things that don’t demand sharp awareness but welcome intuition and flow.
Sometimes, I step away from the desk to walk or swim. These are my meditations. In the water, or amid the wind, inspiration comes more freely. I catch it when it drifts past. I often seek ideas outside the confines of the discipline I’m working in. For instance, if I’m engaged in interior design, I might reach instead for a book of literature — yet even while reading, my mind returns to the design project. I often say that I “hunt” from outside the discipline. This reminds me of something Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa once said about peripheral vision. He argues that when we fixate on something with focused vision, we become outsiders to it. Only through peripheral vision can we become inside a space.
A person cannot lift themselves off the ground by grabbing their own head — perhaps, likewise, one can only truly see a discipline by stepping outside of it. That, at least, is my belief.
I swim. I feel the water when I swim. I learn from water. I feel my body. When I’m in the water, all I care about is how to swim faster, or how to stay safe. Since swimming is a skill I acquired relatively recently — it’s been only two years — my senses are especially attuned to every part of my body. Only through that intense awareness can I gradually adjust how I interact with the water and move more freely within it. In the tension between my body and the water — force and resistance — I begin to sense my own form, my own existence, my relationship with the world.
This makes me wonder: why don’t I apply the same attention to my body when I walk? Is it because walking is too familiar — so habitual that it becomes invisible? This is what I mean when I speak of removing that near-automatic sense of “the self-evident.” Walking, like swimming, can become a form of meditation, a kind of practice. And by extension, if one approaches every daily act with focus, then each day becomes a discipline — a quiet form of training.
This diffuse attentiveness to the self and to the world forms the backdrop of my creative work. The edges where my body meets the world trace the contours of who I am. That interaction defines the very shape of my physical presence.
While swimming, I often contemplate what it means to be like water. Water follows — it flows with the current — but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely passive. After all, the riverbed is yours to shape.
It’s the same in the creative process: stay loose, attuned to the signal. At first, you may offer the work a point of origin — a motive — but after that, resist the urge to grip too tightly. Don’t force your way forward. Don’t become obsessed with a fixed destination. When you’re too tense, your movements become distorted. Let the mind relax. Listen for where the work wants to go.
As the architect Louis Kahn once asked the brick:
What do you want to become?
Your practice navigates between movement and stillness, visibility and obscurity. How do you decide when to reveal versus when to withhold?
YZ: To conceal what I want to convey, to express what cannot be hidden, the part that cannot be held within.
You work with both text and image—how do you determine when language should take the lead versus when visual elements should dominate?
YZ: Text and image are both the Masque of my mind, my emotion, my perception, as well as my awareness. Image is silent language; a paragraph is another kind of image. If I feel the words emerging inwardly, I write them down.
For me, writing is a handy and immediate way to record and express thoughts. Often, fragments of strange and inexplicable phrases drift through my mind — fleeting and without clear origin. Before they vanish, I try to catch and write them down. Later, in some entirely random moment,
I return to these fragments, and more often than not, they begin to connect themselves into longer pieces of writing.
Visual work, on the other hand, requires more effort. But typically, for instance when I’m designing a space or working on another type of design, I begin with a set of adjectives — as
if bringing a veil closer to the object behind it so that its outline becomes clearer. Intuition tells me what it should be: “Let’s begin with the feeling.” From there, I use concrete methods to approach, as closely as possible, the sensation evoked by that group of words.
Your work seeks to uncover ‘invisible beauty’ through tangible materials. What is an example of a project where this tension between the seen and unseen was particularly strong?
YZ: Photography Series: The World and Its Reflection — Abstractive and Reality
This body of work unfolds across two interwoven themes:
[Side A]: Abstractive — textures suspended beyond time and space;
[Side B]: Reality — a reconstruction of truth through imagination, you are the veil of the world.
These dual aspects of the world are bound within a single body, inseparable like two sides of the same coin. They reflect and reveal one another, forming a kind of visual intertext — a dialogue between abstraction and reality.
By shifting the distance of the lens, adjusting the camera’s focal length, and manipulating the image in post-production, I extract textures from the fabric of the real ([Side A]), then allow the abstract fragments to return to a gestalted form ([Side B]).
The senses oscillate between the concrete and the abstract — and in that flicker, we catch a glimpse of the world’s reflection.
You are now exploring stage design, a field distinct from your previous work. What aspects of performance or spatial storytelling interest you most?
YZ: The real-time aspects, the improvisations, and the literariness.
You’ve mentioned being drawn to uncertainty and non-hierarchical structures. How do you embrace chaos while ensuring coherence in your projects?
YZ: I would say “Uncertainty, Non-hierarchical, Chaos”, these words are more like subconsciousness and backdrop during my creative process.
I realized I prefer to create maze-like space, homogeneous plans, the phantasm of a dream, obscure, vague, indistinct, hazy other than clear, straightforward, explicit, definite. Similarly, I create images that are hazy, breezing, unsharp, I love the fuzziness caused by my shaking hands. I try to make it hard to tell if it is a real scene or just an illusion in dream.
In one of my exhibition designs, I incorporated mirrors as a key element to create a sense of illusion. By carefully positioning the mirrors in relation to the displayed objects, and adjusting the angles between the mirrors themselves, I was able to produce an effect of infinite reflection.
What does ‘indexing’ mean in your practice? Is it a method of documentation, interpretation, or something else entirely?
YZ: It is more like a working method, as well the one of the characteristics of “皎皎jiaojiao”.
Your work resists conventional cultural narratives and ‘taken for granted’ structures. Can you give an example of a piece where you actively disrupted a cultural norm?
YZ: I hope that we are truly thinking—truly aware—when we speak each word, each sentence. When we talk about something, are we conscious of what we are really talking about? Is it something you genuinely want to do, something that comes from within? Or is it an expression, a habit shaped by others—by society, by cultural traditions, by inherited conventions?
This act of reflection is a form of self-awareness, an affirmation of one’s subjectivity. I once said, “Everything raw is beautiful,” and I believe it speaks to the same idea. Rawness implies something newly born—something with original and primitive intuitions, fresh, initial, unshaped, unaccustomed to habit. It hasn’t yet acquired the fluency that comes from repetition, and in that sense, it holds a rare and precious quality. I hope to preserve that roughness, that raw sincerity, in my work.
At the same time, this rawness also suggests that the thinking behind it has not yet solidified—it resists blind faith in what merely appears certain. It invites each of us to think for ourselves, to make our own judgments. This uncertainty is, in fact, a form of openness—charged with tension, laced with restlessness, and filled with fresh vitality and endless possibility.
Your projects often play with perception and time. How do you manipulate time—whether conceptually or materially—to shape an audience’s experience?
YZ: Once, while deeply immersed in an exhibition, I had a sudden realization and found myself musing: “The sensation of time passing is different—time is nonlinear, heterogeneous. The time inside a museum is not the same as the time outside.” I wrote this sentence down in my notes. On one hand, time is a highly subjective personal perception; on the other, I hope that my works and writings can soften or even dissolve the prevailing sense of “trending taste”—to transcend the constraints of “fashion” or “era-specific style” and maintain a deliberate distance from the present, in order to evoke a more enduring emotional resonance. Perhaps a truly contemporary person is one who keeps a certain distance from their time—that is also how I understand the notion of the “avant-garde.”
For instance, in the interior design I did for Juanzong Books · China Design Museum, I intentionally avoided fashionable design tropes and trendy visual elements. Instead, I tried to return to fundamentals: to think through modules, proportions, materials, combinations, and arrangements themselves—free from stylistic affectation. In another project, The Garden of Forking Paths, the concept of time is introduced and reinterpreted on two levels. As the ground undulates, the spatial grid becomes denser from one end to the other. Vertically, the space grows narrower and taller, challenging the proportions of everyday environments. Both the field of vision and the bodily experience become compressed—people navigate the space like the blind feeling out an elephant, relying on limited sight to move forward, wandering through a near-labyrinthine experience. One transitions from a spacious, open-ended area with a sense of control over the path ahead, into a zone that is more compressed, more intricate, and full of the unknown. Their perception of time would likely shift drastically in that movement.
Returning to the two-dimensional representation of the space, I employed collage—a method that draws from materials created by different artists from different eras. This act of juxtaposition folds the cosmos onto itself, disregarding linear rules of time. After all, when we turn inward to our own perception, time is more often than not uneven and textured.
The idea of ‘reflection’ appears in your work—both metaphorically and literally. Do you see your art as a mirror to the world, or more as an active distortion of it?
YZ: The inner world of a person resonates with the external world; the latter stirs an emotional vibration within. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, time and space are not absolutes—each individual lives within a space-time dimension shaped by their own experience. An artwork is like a fruit borne at the boundary where the inner world and the outer world meet.
A “mirror” is relatively static and passive—it reflects, merely presenting an appearance of “objectivity.” Yet what I see in the external world depends entirely on my senses, on the cognition shaped by my inner self. From this perspective, it is more an active distortion of the world, and the lens that causes this distortion is none other than the “I” itself. It is precisely this distortion that affirms the existence of the self.
Sometimes I feel the world passes through me—I am a vessel, a medium. And at other times, I feel I am one with the world. I perceive, and I follow.
“Reflection” acts as “Self-examination and reflective” as well.
What are the most recurring motifs or materials in your work, and what significance do they hold for you?
YZ: Screens, Veils, Mirrors.
These things embody a lack of clear hierarchy, form, or boundary—ambiguous, shapeless, unfocused, diffused, soft, and porous. They appear in my work both as tangible materials or objects, and as imagery, as an aesthetic undertone, as a recurring motif.
Your work often exists in a state of flux—between disciplines, spaces, and ideas. Do you see your practice settling into a more defined form, or will it always remain fluid?
YZ: Hopefully my practice could keep wandering in-between diverse disciplines, spaces. To me it means energy and vitality. I do not want to define my work in a specific form, area or whatever. I wish I could always have fresh eyes.
What are you currently reading, watching, or experiencing that is influencing your work?
YZ:
The Foxes Come at Night (’s Nachts komen de vossen) by Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom.
This is a collection of highly stream-of-consciousness short stories. It tells stories, but in a lyrical, evocative manner—somewhere between fiction and essay. Yet it feels unnecessary to confine it within existing literary genres. Personally, I’m neither fond of nor skilled at vivid, detailed narration; my approach tends to be more allusive, sparse, with deliberate silences—a kind of reticence. Speaking or storytelling is the last form of expression I would choose; I prefer meaning that lingers between the lines.
But reading this book, I realized: one can write like this, too—one can recount a life in this way. There are no fixed rules. The standards for “good” writing are multiple. I recognized a certain kinship between us. In some ways, it felt like a kind of affirmation, and that gave me great encouragement. Once you write the first line, the only thing left is to follow it sincerely—without trying to embellish or contrive.
The Lost One (La Femme du Gange) — Marguerite Duras’s cinematic practice.
The collected works and writings of architect John Hejduk.
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking. It is kind of both technological and physical supplement, which balanced my artsy and metaphysics thinking, pulled me out of those focus so that my mind could hang around for a while. It opened a pair of fresh eyes for me—I began to see and understand the world anew, from the very beginning.
There are also a number of moving-image works that have influenced me—New Wave cinema from different regions, experimental films by various Japanese directors, the works of Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, biographical films by Andrei Tarkovsky, and the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, among others.
If you could redesign one everyday object or space through your artistic lens, what would it be and why?
YZ: Music club. People who are hearing- or visually-impaired can also perceive music through their own unique senses. Just as we move our bodies to the rhythm in a club, they respond to music in their own way, within a space designed specifically for them.
What do you hope people experience when they engage with your work? Is there a particular reaction or dialogue you aim to spark?
YZ: To awaken a sensory eye beyond the habitual. If, even for a brief moment, someone feels an emotional resonance through my work—whatever that emotion may be—that, to me, is a deeply joyful and fulfilling thing.
Looking ahead, are there specific concepts, media, or collaborations you are eager to explore in the next few years?
YZ: I hope to transcend the limitations of technique and medium as much as possible, in order to achieve a freer mode of expression. I imagine I might begin experimenting with moving images—using visuals, music, and fluid sensory experiences to weave a kind of labyrinth. It was Marguerite Duras’s cinematic explorations that first inspired me. In addition, certain filmmakers with backgrounds in architecture have encouraged and guided me toward this direction—for example, the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
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