Originally from a small town in the southeastern part of China, Diyou is the third generation after the cultural revolution in China. Diyou's practice explores a longing to find a language to express individuality, reaching a broader connection with the surroundings of living. Hacking the personal past experience is an ongoing goal of Diyou’s exploration as a living being.
Diyou Yu
Being in infinite changing flows how can we locate ourselves in a relatively stable point among the flux?
My practice has been searching for temporary answers or solutions to this question or inevitable situation, and usually, results of explorations are frozen onto two-dimensional surfaces as archived specimens of time. A moment before it disappears, this disappearance may be swift or the change may be incremental over years.
Projects always begin with recollecting visual and audible encounters about wonders in nature, intending to relocate the observers back to moments of interconnection with the natural surroundings of their living spaces. When composure arises and the conditioned mindset has been temporarily expunged. Analogue darkroom printing, etching, drawing, other obsolete, relatively repetitive, and time-consuming methods are used to rewrite, translate, and then represent those replicas of tranquility to audiences, while the experience of making also helps to expand the unconditioned observational space within.
Profoundly influenced by oriental mysticism and other artists whose work seeks to reach the spiritual and intangible. Informed also by my foreign living experience in London, the perception towards where I was born has been reshaped, the old solutions are constantly replaced by the new.
Flux
(2020)
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(2021)
(2021)
'Water-Blood, lymph, mucus, sweat, tears, inner oceans tugged by the moon, tides within and tides without. Streaming fluids floating our cells washing and nourishing through endless riverways of gut and vein and capillary. Moisture pouring in and through and out of you, of me, in the vast poem of the hydrological cycle. You are that. I am that.'
Gaia Meditation by John Seed and Joanna Macy
Water is one of the recurring motifs in my work, it is a substance that connects us all when we seem so separated. And it is also revealing the fact of impermanence.
Medium:
Scanned colour negatives, giclée print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, Photo-litho
(2021)
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Medium:
Scanned colour negatives, giclée print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper
(2021)
(2021）
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（2021）
Seeing a flower before it comes into being, observing the pattern of a plant before its formation.
Medium:
Photo-etching on Somerset paperSize:
20cm x 16cm (image size) ,25cm x 30cm (paper size)
Misty land (2020)
Fragmented Moments (2020)
Fragmented Moments (2021)
Moon (2021)
Fragmented Moments (details)
Fragmented Moments (details)
In the endless waiting time, wind flashes, time passes the rail track at full speed, then hits the skin that is wrapped up with memories: carrying yet distorted, discorded, fragmented recordings. When everything can not be rewound, when answers to the questions swing back and forth, in disordered fragments, the moon arises, a seed is planted, the present moment is fading away, the future is yet to arrive, I peek at the eternity within a second.
Medium:
Photopolymer, Mezottint, Japanese Paper (Tosa Shi), Somerset SatinSize:
A1
Luna (2021)
Luna and Burning Petals (2021)
Dukkha (2021)
Dukkha (2021)
Formation, existence, change, destruction, and voidness, the states of phenomena of mind, my images are responding to the states of change and destruction, implying the next stage.
Medium:
Drypoint on different Japanese PaperSize:
41.5cm x 34.0 cm (Image size), 42cm x 59.4cm (paper size)
(2020)
Recordings of Fading Colours (2020)
Freesia (2021)
Carnation (2021)
Freesia (2021)
Saffron (2021)
Tulip (2021)
During the winter of 2020, recalling the warmth in late spring and early summer, I used more colours in my practice to denote the absent liveliness in the season. Lumen printing is the morning routine of starting a new day, and a record of daily interaction with the external natural world. Here the light is the creator but at the same time also the destroyer of the image, if images do not go through the process of fixation, it will eventually fade away, but the fix will take the rich colours away, in order to keep the colourfulness of the prints, they need to be kept in the dark. This process is a repetition of last year's procedure, but a quicker way to extend the lifespan of dying flowers when there was neither enough UV light nor darkroom enlarger.