In 2022, the Taiwanese artist stopped paying rent. Her fly-on-the-wall new zine documents a month of life spent subletting friends’ places around the world
Three years ago, John Yuyi put the contents of her New York apartment into storage and flew to Zurich to open an exhibition at Galerie Christophe Guye. She hasn’t had a home, in a traditional sense at least, since. The Taiwanese visual artist has been living ‘nomadically’, hopping from cities around the world for work and subletting friends’ flats along the way, never staying anywhere for longer than a month.
“I stopped paying rent in July of 2022,” she tells me over the phone from Rotterdam, where she’s currently staying with her brother. “At the beginning, I was thinking, ‘I’m just taking a short break.’ After the Zurich exhibition opening, I went to Berlin. I was so inspired being in a new city, exploring as a solo traveller, going to raves by myself. I learnt how to smoke weed during that time – even though I was already 31. I went back to New York, but I had this feeling that I still wanted more.”
Yuyi’s breakout project was a series of temporary-tattooed nudes shot in 2016. In the years since, she has explored female identity through the minefield of today’s internet culture and beauty standards, exhibiting globally and producing visuals for fashion brands like Kiko Kostadinov, Miu Miu, and Gucci. Bridging performance and photography, she has journeyed to an amusement park after a regretful rhinoplasty, shrunk models to the size of dolls, and used her body as a landscape as complex as the cities she roves between. With vulnerability and surreal humour, Yuyi turns the self into spectacle – and spectacle into art.
Her latest project, POV – a risograph zine printed by Hato Press – is something quite different from the hyper-staged productions she is best known for. Started on her birthday in 2023, it documents a month of her nomadic life through a series of self-portraits taken in friends’ flats in New York, Barcelona and London. Gathering grainy and unglamorous domestic vignettes, it presents a peep-shot viewpoint into a life spent drifting between places, capturing the artist emptying cat litters, microwaving food, and unclogging hair from shower drains.
“One of the things I did the most was taking care of cats,” she says of the images, which are semi-staged, semi-autobiographical. “Other things are made up – like accidentally dropping your phone in the toilet. The one of me getting a Coke from the fridge I feel is my core.” Often appearing nude, the project reveals the strange intimacy of making house in someone else’s home – the humdrum rituals of daily living becoming the only constant from place to place.
The images also became a way to process the unique psychological experience of never settling. “It’s really weird, sometimes I‘ll be waking up thinking, ‘Where am I?’ It takes a moment to process, ‘Okay, I’m in this country, this city, and this friend’s place,” she says. “I think it‘s healthy and unhealthy in different ways. My eyes are constantly opened to new experiences. But you can’t find a partner because you never stay in one place. You carry less and less, because you’re constantly travelling, you can‘t have your cute clothes. I don’t think it’s really stable.”
Initially, she intended to take an image every day, but gave up after a month, partly for practical reasons (lens set-ups weren’t possible in every place) and partly because she lost steam. “Once it lost its authenticity, I stopped,” she says. “So this project failed, but I feel like my mission currently is to be zen and laid back.” Yuyi does, however, religiously take a nude self-portrait whenever she gets on a flight. “I’ve been doing that since 2018,” she says. “There are hundreds now.”
While the nomadic life has its difficulties, Yuyi doesn’t have any plans to settle just yet. In the last few weeks alone, she’s gone from Tokyo – where she showed work inspired by JD Salinger’s Nine Stories alongside Kazuhei Kimura, Chikashi Suzuki, and Daido Moriyama at New Gallery – to Mexico City for an editorial, to Hokkaido to learn how to snowboard and back to Tokyo for the peak of cherry blossom season. Last week, she was in London shooting a story for AnOther on the streets outside of Buckingham Palace.
“It’s been an amazing few weeks,” she says. “In Tokyo, I got to meet all these Japanese and Hong Kong photographers that I have admired since I was a kid. When I was in London, I saw a seal in the River Thames, which apparently only happens to like 100 people a year. I felt like, ‘Oh my god. This is too crazy – Yuyi, please cherish your life.’”
POV by John Yuyi is published by Hato Press, and is out now.
