Chris Zhongtian Yuan: Two Improvisations at esea contemporary

Like many before him, Chris Zhongtian Yuan is hunting a creature nobody can prove exists. Like few before him, he’s using that hunt to think about what it means to be an artist.

The Yěrén – an ape-like ‘wild man’ said to roam the mountains of Hubei province – is a centuries-old fixture of Chinese folklore that resurfaced after the Cultural Revolution, when sightings multiplied into what became known as ‘Yěrén fever’ and culminated in the largest organised search for the creature, in 1977. Yuan, who grew up in Wuhan and now lives in London, is midway through turning that search into a trilogy of films. Two Improvisations at esea contemporary presents the second instalment.

Emerging at a moment when Chinese society was renegotiating the place of culture and creativity, this elusive ‘wild man’ has become, for Yuan, a stand-in for the artist: “a figure both visible and othered, alternately mythologised, pursued, and misunderstood”.

The exhibition’s new commission, Two Improvisations: A Punk Musical, runs across two channels. One is built from miniature sets recreating spaces from Yuan’s own life – childhood rooms, an art school, a Hong Kong museum, a theatre, a city – with Yuan filmed moving the props by hand, switching between the roles of maker and puppeteer and building remembered spaces which the artist and the Yěrén can inhabit interchangeably.

The other channel hands the story to a real band: Hardcore Raver in Tears, the Wuhan group led by musician Lu Yan, performing four songs written with Yuan for the film, drawing on punk, jazz and pop. The projection spills across the gallery’s walls and floor, including lyrics describing the elusive Yěrén.

In the Communal Project Space, the DIY props from the film step off-screen and become a stage in their own right. It brings the film’s miniature world into tangible form, but also asks what this shift in context (and dimensions) does to them. For Yuan, it’s another way of querying the artist’s ‘self’ in relation to their surroundings.

Two Improvisations runs on a punk instinct: make it yourself, by hand, and on your own terms. It’s a response to the uncertain, precarious position artists found themselves in after the Cultural Revolution, when culture and creativity in China were being tightly redrawn – a precarity that many will see as ongoing. The show lands in esea contemporary’s 40th year, which also marks 40 years since Manchester and Wuhan became twin cities. For a Wuhan-born artist who’s spent the last few years treating Manchester as a second home, this show feels perfectly timed.