Special Screening and Artist Talk, DRC NO.12, Beijing, China, 18 October 2025
- yaoqingmeistudio
- Oct 16
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 27
Special Screening and Artist Talk in DRC NO.12
12号空间内部放映及交流
18 October 2025
SAT 19:00
酒仙桥东路1号院牡丹创新孵化路
Peony Innovation Incubator, No.1 Jiuxianqiao East Road
More information: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/WUDydlNpCEpfkqKfppSURw
Screening Works
Yao Qingmei
Third verse of the Internationale, sung solo in Monaco
2012
Video Subtitling recorded after art action, sound, 12’30''
“The State oppresses and the law cheats, Tax bleeds the unfortunate; No duty is imposed on the rich, The rights of the poor is an empty phrase.” Strangely enough, although the third verse of the Internationale really exists and is supposedly anarchist in intent, it is never sung during demonstrations. Singing the hymn out aloud in a famous tax haven like Monaco where local inhabitants are unlikely to have ever heard it before gives voice to truths that are kept hidden, despite the action itself being absurd and naive in such an imposing setting. Broadcasting the song through a loud-hailer, the car went twice around the Grand Prix Formula 1 circuit before coming to a halt at Place du Casino square. Here, two policemen rapidly intervened to silence us and a discussion duly ensued in which the specific languages of art and politics collided, so shedding light on the narrow fissure where art finds a refuge.
Performor: YAO QingmeiDate: le 16 Mars 2012
The route: Monaco Grand Prix circuit The performance starts at 12:30 pm, at the start of the circuit (Bd Albert 1er) Participants and Witnesses: Jedrzej ， Anne-Sophie ， Agathe ， Fahd ， Subei
Yao Qingmei
Prelude to Love
2023
Single-Channel Video, 11’55”
YAO Qingmei extended an invitation to a retired Chinese female soprano, previously a member of the Liberation Army Cultural Troupe, who now resides in France, to perform the patriotic song I Love You, China. This song was initially featured in the 1979 film Overseas Children海外赤子, a poignant narrative about Chinese Malaysians returning to Hainan Island in China during the “open door” period in the recent Chinese history.
Yao Qingmei
The Burrow – Monitor & Control
2021
Video, 22 mins 23 seconds
This video work depicts a female security guard who is intimately connected to the security machines, situated in an underground surveillance room of a gated middle-class community in China. In this hidden digital prison, the controller perceives the time, nature, and weather of the outside world through LCD screens and cameras. The natural objects in front of the cameras—a few growing willow branches, vibrating leaves—playfully enter the dull image frame and obscure the cameras. The guard's task is to identify the cameras covered by the branches of plants and then notify the gardeners to trim them. The machines operate autonomously, as if they were living organisms, conducting the human body with incessant alarms, while the human becomes an integrated circuit board, gradually exhausted by the collaborative labor of the auxiliary digital machines. She herself is constantly under surveillance. This troubling central control room, echoing Kafka’s allegories of “Prometheus” and “The Burrow,” reveals the universal plight of human beings amidst digital noise.
Yao Qingmei
Mole
2023
Exhibition Installation
Nine videos, ceramics, prints, fabric, glass, wood, metal, etc
20 m x 20 m x 3.8 m
"Mole" is a vast labyrinth composed of nine nested rooms, designed by Yao Qingmei. This dreamlike labyrinth brings together a multitude of interconnected works: videos, sculptures, installations, engravings, as well as decorative elements. The labyrinth begins with "The Night," serving as a prelude and guiding spectators through a series of isolated and silent allegorical characters that overlap in each room: a mole imprisoned in a luxury hotel room, dancers in a regular hotel room, an employee climbing the walls of his office, "Oblomov" lying in bed all day, and a story "Rat Utopia." The spectators' bodies, spying on the works through locked doors, peepholes, and cracks, become animalized themselves. The artist disrupts the internal and external structure of the rooms, blurring the boundaries between private and public space, and reinterprets the paradox of "seeing and being seen" in the fusion of fiction and reality.
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