Yesterday Yet to Come 2 (다가올 어제 2) (昨日将至 2)

Yesterday Yet to Come 2 (다가올 어제 2) (昨日将至 2)

Year: 2025
Material: False bamboo, bamboo chapstick, bamboo, 3d print, bobbin, pallet, container, gesso, plaster, cable tie, video, construction lumber, Simpson's tie
Instrumentation: Cassette Tapes and Live Electronics
Size: 15' x 12' x8' , 10min performance

This collaborative installation by Wonchul Ryu and Yanqi Chen considers Asian identity as a continual reconfiguration shaped by migration, adaptation, and misrecognition. Ryu’s sculptural elements form a scattered landscape of pallets and disposable containers.

From this ground, bamboo, false bamboo (Asian knotweed), and mass-produced bamboo chopsticks rise, bound together with cable ties. Bamboo evokes familiar images of “Asia.” False bamboo, an East Asian plant classified as invasive in the United States, points to misrecognition. Disposable chopsticks project a consumable image of Asianness. Together, these materials suggest an Asian identity shaped by the entanglement of origin, consumption, and misrecognition.

At the center of the installation, Yanqi Chen performs live electronic sound using cassette players. Her performance draws from field recordings, radio broadcasts, songs in her first language, and anonymous voices preserved on cassette tapes from the 1980s.

Layered and manipulated in real time, these sonic fragments circulate between past and present, intimacy and distance. Ryu’s A two-channel video projected onto separated folding screens extends this circulation across sound, image, and space, allowing translation to remain partial and unresolved.