Yi Zhu

Yi Zhu 朱亿 is a visual artist based in Shanghai and London. She prefers to combine interdisciplinary knowledge and technology.

Her creative topic radiates outward with humans as the center, exploring the relationship between human and human, human and Anthropocene, human and nature, and human and the universe.

With a background in contemporary art and information experience design, she mainly creates visual images with narrative, by using moving images, painting, illustration, and 3D software.

Now she's focusing on exploring the realm of virtual reality, expanding XR narrative.

THE FACELESS FACE is a VR film that questions the perception of what is ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ and explores various systems of control. In this project, ‘psychotic madness’ is the medium for the critical discussion of the code of moral conduct derived from reason and unreason.

Michel Foucault mentioned that the criterion of reason and unreason is the way that the minority of society uses prior knowledge to gain social governance and discourse of power. But following Kant's ideas, knowledge is a subjective product.

Through non-linear narratives, the project points out the control of individual identity by a social group consciousness but also attempts to influence people who are controlled by social values and confined to self-limited identity labels, not to be affected by the bondage of social status, living environment, and religious belief.

The story follows a family conversation with police at various stages of the family's 15-year transition, revealing that everyone in the family has symptoms of various madness. At the end of the story, the policewoman is a patient who has lived in a mental hospital for a long time, and the family is a reflection of her imagination by three doctors who treat her with violence every day.