As a practitioner of participatory art, Yu Mingjing’s creations always focus on the resonance between individual experience and collective subconscious. From the traces of industrial migration, the folds of family memories to the fluidity of social identities, she attempts to transform the body into a medium for carrying memories through cross-media languages such as performance, video, and sound, and explores the fragility of the emotional structure and its dynamic game with the social space through material interventions and participatory actions.
This sharing will present examples of Yu Mingjing’s practice in recent years, and together we will discuss how artists can activate the connection between people and their families, cities, and memories through simple participation, as well as how to stimulate more possibilities for participatory art.
“NIGHT SCHOOL NY INSIGHT” Vol. 52
The Performance In Partcipatory Art:
Activate The Resonance Between The Individual And The Collective
Lecture: Mingjing Yu
Host：Jody Huang
19:30-21:30March 16th, 2025 (Sun)
Sponsor: UP-ON Performance Art Archive
Mingjing Yu
Mingjing Yu is a cross-media artist working in participatory performance, video, photography, sound and installation. Her practice often draws on personal experience to explore the deep structure of memory, collective subconscious, and emotion through metaphorical materials, physical behavior, and intuitive creation techniques, building subtle fields of perception and imagination.
< Plowing The Wave > 2016
Futility is an ongoing collaborative project initiated by Yu Mingjing and Yili Liu in 2016. Through the never-ending and futile act of Sisyphus testing in natural or man-made environments. Often documented and presented in video form, the constant repetition of labor in the images also blurs the concept of time. The past, present, and future are all covered by an endless stream of unified action.
“A man plowing the waves,”
“A man rowing in the desert,” “A man cutting a waterfall,” A man fishing in the air. “A man lighting a lamp in the daytime.”
< Lifting A Piece Of Glass > 2019
All family members in Chengdu are invited to come and lift a piece of glass in the gallery.
Participants: One family (Yu Yongchuan, Zhang Li, Yu Jing, Yu Tao, Shen Yi, Duan Yuxiang, Yu Zhiyuan, Yu Mingjing)
< Sleeping Body > 2023
Sleeping Bodies is an ongoing art project that was launched in 2023 as part of the Gold Town Residency Program in Yokohama, Japan. The project invites participants of different identities, ages and genders to sleep in a location of their own choosing, and performs non-invasive documentation with a single lens fixed camera position. Due to the intimate nature of the sleep, the program focuses on establishing a trusting negotiation mechanism with potential local participants.
The core of the project lies in the participants’ choices – the choice of venue reveals the participants’ memories or subconscious, while the sleeping position reflects their personality traits and sense of security. When the sleep videos of different participants are exhibited simultaneously, the collective subconscious of the different groups is presented.
